Flow Equations for Uplifting Half-Flat to Spin(7) Manifolds

Abstract

In this short supplement to [1], we discuss the uplift of half-flat six-folds to Spin(7) eight-folds by fibration of the former over a product of two intervals. We show that the same can be done in two ways - one, such that the required Spin(7) eight-fold is a double G_2 seven-fold fibration over an interval, the G_2 seven-fold itself being the half-flat six-fold fibered over the other interval, and second, by simply considering the fibration of the half-flat six-fold over a product of two intervals. The flow equations one gets are an obvious generalization of the Hitchin's flow equations (to obtain seven-folds of G_2 holonomy from half-flat six-folds [2]). We explicitly show the uplift of the Iwasawa using both methods, thereby proposing the form of the new Spin(7) metrics. We give a plausibility argument ruling out the uplift of the Iwasawa manifold to a Spin(7) eight fold at the "edge", using the second method. For $Spin(7)$ eight-folds of the type $X_7\times S^1$, $X_7$ being a seven-fold of SU(3) structure, we motivate the possibility of including elliptic functions into the "shape deformation" functions of seven-folds of SU(3) structure of [1] via some connections between elliptic functions, the Heisenberg group, theta functions, the already known $D7$-brane metric [3] and hyper-Kähler metrics obtained in twistor spaces by deformations of Atiyah-Hitchin manifolds by a Legendre transform in [4].