image orientifolds, Yukawa couplings, stringy instantons and proton decay Original Research Article

We construct a large class of image orientifold vacua with tadpole cancellation both for the standard and the flipped case. We give a general analysis of superpotential couplings up to quartic order in orientifold vacua and identify the properties of needed Yukawa couplings as well as the baryon number violating couplings. We point out that successful generation of the perturbatively forbidden Yukawa couplings entails a generically disastrous rate for proton decay from an associated quartic term in the superpotential, generated from the same instanton effects. We search for the appropriate instanton effects that generate the missing Yukawa couplings in the image vacua we constructed and find them in a small subset of them.