## Monday, February 08, 2010

### New particle masses in heterotic orbifolds

I still consider the heterotic compactifications to be the most natural - and most likely - realizations of the real world within string theory.

The natural incorporation of the gauge group into the E8, the gauge coupling unification, a natural setup to explain the three families, and the uniform "field-theoretical" realization of all the known low-energy fields just "smells" right.
Ben Dundee, Stuart Raby, Alexander Westphal
have studied the moduli stabilization and SUSY breaking in heterotic orbifold string models. A superpotential in the hidden sector breaks SUSY and all moduli are stabilized by supergravity effects.

The models have an MSSM spectrum with all the required realistic properties and a chance for a very small cosmological constant - relatively to the heavy stringy AdS starting point. But what I find amazing is their ability to calculate the masses of all new particles. Various superpartners go from 100 GeV to tens of TeV and a large portion of them should be detectable at the LHC.

Most of the masses are around 1 TeV. But look how amazingly explicit and accurate the models are concerning their predictions of pretty much anything. Click to zoom in.