Rare decay modes of quarter BPS dyons

Abstract

The degeneracy of quarter BPS dyons in N=4 supersymmetric string theories is known to jump across walls of marginal stability on which a quarter BPS dyon can decay into a pair of half BPS dyons. We show that as long as the electric and magnetic charges of the original dyon are primitive elements of the charge lattice, the subspaces of the moduli space on which a quarter BPS dyon becomes marginally unstable against decay into a pair of quarter BPS dyons or a half BPS dyon and a quarter BPS dyon are of codimension two or more. As a result any pair of generic points in the moduli space can be connected by a path avoiding these subspaces and there is no jump in the spectrum associated with these subspaces.