Generalized Cohomologies and Supersymmetry

We show that the complex cohomologies of Bott, Chern, and Aeppli and the symplectic cohomologies of Tseng and Yau arise in the context of type II string theory. Specifically, they can be used to count a subset of scalar moduli fields in Minkowski compactification with RR fluxes in the presence of either O5/D5 or O6/D6 brane sources, respectively. Further, we introduce a new set of cohomologies within the generalized complex geometry framework which interpolate between these known complex and symplectic cohomologies. The generalized complex cohomologies play the analogous role for counting massless fields for a general supersymmetric Minkowski type II compactification with Ramond–Ramond flux.