Supersymmetry versus Gauge Symmetry on the Heterotic Landscape

Understand

One of the goals of the landscape program in string theory is to extract information about the space of string vacua in the form of statistical correlations between phenomenological features that are otherwise uncorrelated in field theory.

• Such correlations would thus represent predictions of string theory that hold independently of a vacuum-selection principle.
• In this paper, we study statistical correlations between two features which are likely to be central to any potential description of nature at high energy scales: gauge symmetries and spacetime supersymmetry.
• We analyze correlations between these two kinds of symmetry within the context of perturbative heterotic string vacua, and find a number of striking features.