Universality of radiative corrections to gauge couplings for strings with spontaneously broken supersymmetry

Abstract

I review recent work on computing radiative corrections to non-abelian gauge couplings in four-dimensional heterotic vacua with spontaneously broken supersymmetry. The prototype models can be considered as K3 surfaces with additional Scherk-Schwarz fluxes inducing the spontaneous $\mathcal{N}=2 \to \mathcal{N}=0$ breaking. Remarkably, although the gauge thresholds are no longer BPS protected and receive contributions also from the excitations of the RNS sector, their difference is still exactly computable and universal. Based on a talk presented at the DISCRETE 2014 conference at King's College London.