De Sitter vacua from heterotic M-theory

It is shown how metastable de Sitter vacua might arise from heterotic M-theory. The balancing of its two non-perturbative effects, open membrane instantons against gaugino condensation on the hidden boundary, which act with opposing forces on the interval length, is used to stabilize the orbifold modulus (dilaton) and other modui. The non-perturbative effects break supersymmetry spontaneously through F-terms which leads to a positive vacuum energy density. In contrast to the situation for the weakly coupled heterotic string, the charged scalar matter fields receive 'non-vanishing' vacuum expectation values and therefore masses in a phenomenologically relevant regime. it is important that in order to obtain these de Sitter vacua we are not relying on exotic effects of fine-tuning of parameters. Vacua with more realistic supersymmetry breaking scales and gravitino masses are obtained by breaking the hidden E-8 gauge group down to groups of smaller rank. Also small values for the open membrane instanton Pfaffian are favored in this respect. Finally we outline how the incorporation of additional flux superpotentials can he used to stabilize the remaining moduli. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.