Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cerdeira, José Luis V., Corral, Cristóbal, Ortín, Tomás
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14668
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914567223771136
author Cerdeira, José Luis V.
Corral, Cristóbal
Ortín, Tomás
author_facet Cerdeira, José Luis V.
Corral, Cristóbal
Ortín, Tomás
contents We study the $α'$ corrections to self-dual gravitational instantons in the context of the four-dimensional Cano--Ruipérez action, which can be obtained by the compactification of the Bergshoeff--de Roo heterotic string effective action on $\mathbb{T}^{6}$ followed by a truncation and a field redefinition. We show that the metric of spaces of self-dual curvature does not receive any corrections, but their (initially trivial) dilaton and axion fields do, owing to their couplings to Gauss--Bonnet and Pontrjagin densities. We find the generic form of the corrections of the dilaton and axion fields for the Gibbons--Hawking multi-instanton solutions and their explicit form for the particular cases of the Euclidean Taub--NUT and Eguchi--Hanson spaces. We construct the boundary terms required to define a well-posed Dirichlet variational principle in the Euclidean Cano--Ruipérez theory, including the contributions associated with the Gauss--Bonnet and Pontrjagin terms. The boundary terms are normalized for asymptotically-locally-Euclidean solutions, and we evaluate with them the Euclidean action of the $α'$-corrected Eguchi--Hanson instanton showing that the total action receives no corrections to first order in $α'$. We also show that, at zeroth order in $α'$, one can construct Euclidean solutions similar to the string theory D-instanton with non-trivial dilaton and axion on the background of a self-dual purely gravitational instanton which remains unmodified. We also compute the $α'$ corrections to these solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_14668
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle $α'$ corrections to self-dual gravitational instantons
Cerdeira, José Luis V.
Corral, Cristóbal
Ortín, Tomás
High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
We study the $α'$ corrections to self-dual gravitational instantons in the context of the four-dimensional Cano--Ruipérez action, which can be obtained by the compactification of the Bergshoeff--de Roo heterotic string effective action on $\mathbb{T}^{6}$ followed by a truncation and a field redefinition. We show that the metric of spaces of self-dual curvature does not receive any corrections, but their (initially trivial) dilaton and axion fields do, owing to their couplings to Gauss--Bonnet and Pontrjagin densities. We find the generic form of the corrections of the dilaton and axion fields for the Gibbons--Hawking multi-instanton solutions and their explicit form for the particular cases of the Euclidean Taub--NUT and Eguchi--Hanson spaces. We construct the boundary terms required to define a well-posed Dirichlet variational principle in the Euclidean Cano--Ruipérez theory, including the contributions associated with the Gauss--Bonnet and Pontrjagin terms. The boundary terms are normalized for asymptotically-locally-Euclidean solutions, and we evaluate with them the Euclidean action of the $α'$-corrected Eguchi--Hanson instanton showing that the total action receives no corrections to first order in $α'$. We also show that, at zeroth order in $α'$, one can construct Euclidean solutions similar to the string theory D-instanton with non-trivial dilaton and axion on the background of a self-dual purely gravitational instanton which remains unmodified. We also compute the $α'$ corrections to these solutions.
title $α'$ corrections to self-dual gravitational instantons
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14668