Effective superpotentials for compact D5-brane Calabi-Yau geometries (Q1048041)

It is well-known that type II string theory compactified on Calabi-Yau threefolds with background fluxes or space time filling D-branes is described in the low-energy regime by \(N = 1\) effective supergravity theories. For such string compactifications, in the present paper, the authors give new techniques to compute the effective superpotential, which is part of the defining data of \(N = 1\) supergravities. They focus on \(D5\)-branes geometries whose moduli spaces are describable by studying certain divisors of the embedding Calabi-Yau spaces. These Calabi-Yau threefolds are realized as hypersurfaces in \(4\)-dimensional complex (weighted) projective spaces. By expressing the relative \(3\)-forms associated to the \(D5\)-brane geometry in terms of residue integrals, the authors are able to explicitly analyze the corresponding variations of mixed Hodge structure. In this way, they are able to derive the open/closed Picard-Fuchs equations of the relative period vector governing the effective superpotential. Their solutions encode the flat open/closed coordinates and the effective superpotential. In Section 4 and 5, they apply their techniques in detail to two concrete examples and they express the calculated superpotentials in terms of flat open/closed coordinates. The first example is given by a family of \(D5\)-branes in the degree eight Calabi-Yau hypersurface of the weighted projective space \(\mathbb {WP}^4_{(1,1,1,1,4)}/(\mathbb Z_8)^2 \times\mathbb Z_2\). The second example is a family of \(D5\)-branes in the mirror quintic Calabi-Yau threefold. For these examples, they extract orbifold disk invariants for the associated mirror geometries and determine domain wall tensions in agreement with the results in the literature.