Aspects of type I type II heterotic triality in four dimensions

We discuss the equivalence between type I, type II and heterotic N = 2 superstring theories in four dimensions. We study the effective field theory of type I models obtained by orientifold reductions of type IIB compactifications on K-3 x T-2. We show that the perturbative prepotential is determined by the one-loop corrections to the Planck mass and is associated to an index. As is the case for threshold corrections to gauge couplings, this renormalization is entirely due to N = 2 BPS states that originate from D = 6 massless string modes. We apply our result to the so-called S-T-U model which admits simultaneous type II and heterotic descriptions, and show that all three prepotentials agree in the appropriate limits as expected from the superstring triality conjecture. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.