On The Warped Heterotic Axion

Abstract

We study the axion in a warped heterotic background. It is shown that the axion decay constant, f_a, is sensitive to the warped mass scale of the throat. As an explicit model, we construct a novel AdS-like geometry in heterotic string theory. We demonstrate that in this background f_a is given by the mass scale of the longest throat in the compactification. The question of obtaining f_a within the required bound 10^9--10^12 GeV is reduced to the construction of a throat inside the heterotic string theory compactification with warped mass scale in the above range. This provides a natural mechanism for realising the axion in heterotic string theory.

Comments: Latex, 31 pages, no figures; v2: some typos corrected, a short discussion on standard model embedding, and references added. Final version to appear in JHEP