Heterotic strings on Enriques surfaces

Abstract

A bstract We study orbifold compactifications of heterotic strings on Enriques surfaces. We classify the inequivalent shift vectors for both the E 8 × E 8 and Spin(32)/ ℤ 2 lattices, and analyse the light spectrum of the resulting models. We show that these models can be interpreted as compactifications of ten-dimensional non-supersymmetric heterotic strings on Enriques surfaces. For certain classes of shifts, the moduli-independent tachyons inherited from the parent theories are projected out.