| We study the superpotential for the heterotic string compactified on non-Kahler complex manifolds. We show that many of the geometrical properties of these manifolds can be understood from the proposed superpotential. In particular we give an estimate of the radial modulus of these manifolds. We also show how the torsional constraints can be obtained from this superpotential.; For a given complex n-fold M we present an explicit construction of all complex (n + 1)-folds which are principal holomorphic T2-fibrations over M. For physical applications we consider the case of M being a Calabi-Yau 2-fold. We show that for such M, there is a subclass of the 3-folds that we construct, which has natural families of non-Kahler SU(3)-structures satisfying the conditions for N = 1 supersymmetry in the heterotic string theory compactified on the 3-folds. We present examples in the aforementioned subclass with M being a K3-surface and a 4-torus.; The distance between BPS branes in string theory corresponds to a flat direction in the effective potential. Small deviations from supersymmetry may lead to a small uplifting of this flat direction and to brane inflation. However, this scenario can work only if the BPS properties of the branes and the corresponding flatness of the inflaton potential are preserved in the stable volume compactification. We present an "inflaton trench" mechanism that keeps the inflaton potential flat due to shift symmetry, which is related to near BPS symmetry in our model. |
