The Ubiquitous Throat

Journal article

We attempt to quantify the widely-held belief that large hierarchies induced by strongly-warped geometries are common in the string theory landscape. To this end, we focus on the arguably best-understood subset of vacua -- type IIB Calabi-Yau orientifolds with non-perturbative Kaehler stabilization and a SUSY-breaking uplift (the KKLT setup). Within this framework, vacua with a realistically small cosmological constant are expected to come from Calabi-Yaus with a large number of 3-cycles. For appropriate choices of flux numbers, many of these 3-cycles can, in general, shrink to produce near-conifold geometries. Thus, a simple statistical analysis in the spirit of Denef and Douglas allows us to estimate the expected number and length of Klebanov-Strassler throats in the given set of vacua. We find that throats capable of explaining the electroweak hierarchy are expected to be present in a large fraction of the landscape vacua while shorter throats are essentially unavoidable in a statistical sense.

Authors: Hebecker, A; March-Russell, J

• Publication status: Published
• Journal: Nucl.Phys.B
• Volume: 781
• Issue: 1-3
• Pages: 99-111
• Publication date: 2006-07-18
• DOI: 10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2007.05.003
• ISSN: 0550-3213
• Language: English
• Keywords: hep-ph; hep-th