Integral Scaling for EFT Strings from the Bottom-Up

Abstract

Near the core of an EFT string in a 4d $\mathcal{N}=1$ theory, the scalars are dynamically driven to infinite field distance and a tower of states becomes light, with mass scaling with the string tension in Planck units as $m^2\sim \mathcal{T}^{\,w}$. According to the Integral Scaling Conjecture, $w$ takes only values 1, 2 and 3. In this paper, we examine how this conjecture can follow from the brane-taxonomy rules associated with the Emergent String Conjecture. In this context, we classify the relevant types of duality frames into 74 classes, identify which lattice sites can be relevant EFT candidates, and exhaustively test integral scaling for all of these candidates. We find that it holds with $w\leq 3$ for all the leading towers and also for the subleading towers below the species scale (up to half-integral subtleties that also appear in top-down examples). We further find evidence that the oscillator modes of EFT string candidates generate the lattices of particles and strings. Moreover, $w=1$ implies a perturbative string limit, but the converse is not true. We compare our classification with concrete type IIA, F-theory and M-theory compactifications.