F-theory on all toric hypersurface fibrations and its Higgs branches

Abstract

Abstract: We consider F-theory compactifications on genus-one fibered Calabi-Yau manifolds with their fibers realized as hypersurfaces in the toric varieties associated to the 16 reflexive 2D polyhedra. We present a base-independent analysis of the codimension one, two and three singularities of these fibrations. We use these geometric results to determine the gauge groups, matter representations, 6D matter multiplicities and 4D Yukawa couplings of the corresponding effective theories. All these theories have a non-trivial gauge group and matter content. We explore the network of Higgsings relating these theories. Such Higgsings geometrically correspond to extremal transitions induced by blow-ups in the 2D toric varieties. We recover the 6D effective theories of all 16 toric hypersurface fibrations by repeatedly Higgsing the theories that exhibit Mordell-Weil torsion. We find that the three Calabi-Yau manifolds without section, whose fibers are given by the toric hypersurfaces in ℙ2,ℙ1×ℙ1 and the recently studied ℙ2, yield F-theory realizations of SUGRA theories with discrete gauge groups ℤ3, ℤ2 and ℤ4. This opens up a whole new arena for model building with discrete global symmetries in F-theory. In these three manifolds, we also find codimension two I2-fibers supporting matter charged only under these discrete gauge groups. Their 6D matter multiplicities are computed employing ideal techniques and the associated Jacobian fibrations. We also show that the Jacobian of the biquadric fibration has one rational section, yielding one U(1)-gauge field in F-theory. Furthermore, the elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau manifold based on dP1 has a U(1)-gauge field induced by a non-toric rational section. In this model, we find the first F-theory realization of matter with U(1)-charge q = 3.