https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14452-y
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Emergence of 
-couplings in heterotic/type IIA dual string theories
1
Max-Planck-Institut für Physik (Werner-Heisenberg-Institut), Boltzmannstr. 8, 85748, Garching, Germany
2
Fakultät für Physik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Theresienstr. 37, 80333, Munich, Germany
Received:
16
April
2025
Accepted:
19
June
2025
Published online:
2
July
2025
The M-theoretic emergence proposal claims that in an isotropic decompactification limit to M-theory the full effective action is generated via quantum effects by integrating out only the light towers of states of the theory. In the BPS particle sector, these include transversally wrapped M2- and M5-branes possibly carrying Kaluza–Klein momentum. This implies that a longitudinally wrapped M5-brane, i.e. a wrapped D4-brane, is not to be included in emergence computations. In this work we collect explicit evidence supporting this point by examining an gauge coupling in six dimensions, making use of the duality between heterotic string theory on 
and strongly coupled type IIA on K3. In this instance, the M-theoretic emergence proposal can be viewed as a tool for making predictions for the microscopic behavior of string theoretic amplitudes.
© The Author(s) 2025
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Funded by SCOAP3.
