A landscape of orientifold vacua

Abstract

We present a vast landscape of O3/O7 orientifolds that descends from the famous set of complete intersection Calabi-Yau threefolds (CICY). We give distributions of topological data relevant for phenomenology such as the orientifold-odd Hodge numbers, the D3-tadpole, and multiplicities of O3 and O7-planes. Somewhat surprisingly, almost all of these orientifolds have conifold singularities whose deformation branches are projected out by the orientifolding. However, they can be resolved, so most of the orientifolds actually descend from a much larger and possibly new set of CY threefolds that can be reached from the CICYs via conifold transitions. We observe an interesting class of $\mathcal{N}=1$ geometric transitions involving colliding O-planes. Finally, as an application, we use our dataset to produce examples of orientifolds that satisfy the topological requirements for the existence of ultra-light throat axions (\textit{thraxions}) as proposed in \cite{Hebecker:2018yxs}. The database can be accessed at https://www.desy.de/~westphal/orientifold_webpage/cicy_orientifolds.html

Topics & Concepts