Stringy tachyonic instabilities of non-supersymmetric Ricci flat backgrounds

Abstract

Superstring/M-theory compactified on compact Ricci flat manifolds have recently been conjectured to exhibit instabilities whenever the metrics do not have special holonomy. We use worldsheet conformal field theory to investigate instabilities of Type II superstring theories on compact, Ricci flat, spin 3-manifolds including a worldsheet description of their spin structures. The instabilities are signalled by the appearance of stringy tachyons at small radius and a negative (1-loop) vacuum energy density at large radius. We briefly discuss the extension to higher dimensions.