D7 moduli stabilization: the tadpole menace

Abstract

D7-brane moduli are stabilized by worldvolume fluxes, which contribute to the D3-brane tadpole. We calculate this contribution in the Type IIB limit of F-theory compactifications on Calabi-Yau four-folds with a weak Fano base, and are able to prove a no-go theorem for vast swathes of the landscape of compactifications. When the genus of the curve dual to the D7 worldvolume fluxes is fixed and the number of moduli grows, we find that the D3 charge sourced by the fluxes grows faster than 7/16 of the number of moduli, which supports the Tadpole Conjecture of ref. [1]. Our lower bound for the induced D3 charge decreases when the genus of the curves dual to the stabilizing fluxes increase, and does not allow to rule out a sliver of flux configurations dual to high-genus high-degree curves. However, we argue that most of these fluxes have very high curvature, which is likely to be above the string scale except on extremely large (and experimentally ruled out) compactification manifolds.