Fluxes in heterotic and type II string compactifications Original Research Article

In this paper we consider heterotic compactifications on K3×T2 as well as type II compactifications on K3-fibred Calabi–Yau spaces with certain fluxes for the gauge and R–R field strengths F and H turned on. By providing an identification of corresponding fluxes we show that the well-known N=2 heterotic/type II string–string duality still holds for a subset of all possible fluxes, namely those which arise from six-dimensional gauge fields with internal magnetic flux on the common two-sphere Pb1, which is the base space of the type II K3-fibration. On the other hand, F- and H-fluxes without Pb1-support, such as heterotic F-fluxes on the torus T2 or type II H-fluxes on cycles of the K3-fibre cannot be matched in any simple way, which is a challenge for heterotic/type II string–string duality. Our analysis is based on the comparison of terms in the effective low-energy heterotic and type II actions which are induced by the fluxes, such as the Green–Schwarz couplings related to flux-induced U(1) anomalies, the effective superpotential and the Fayet–Iliopoulos scalar potential.