Constructing nongeometric vacua in string theory

In this paper we investigate compactifications of the type II and heterotic string on four-dimensional spaces with nongeometric monodromies. We explicitly construct backgrounds which contain the “Duality Twists” discussed by Dabholkar and Hull [JHEP 0309 (2003) 054, hep-th/0210209]. Similar constructions of nongeometric backgrounds have been discussed for type II strings by Hellerman, McGreevy, and Williams [hep-th/0208174]. We find that imposing such monodromies projects out many moduli from the resulting vacua and argue that these backgrounds are the spacetime realizations of interpolating asymmetric orbifolds.