Compactifications of the heterotic string on Td are the simplest, yet rich enough playgrounds to uncover swampland ideas: the U(1)d+16 left-moving gauge symmetry gets enhanced at special points in moduli space only to certain groups. We state criteria, based on lattice embedding techniques, to establish whether a gauge group is realized or not. For generic d, we further show how to obtain the moduli that lead to a given gauge group by modifying the method of deleting nodes in the extended Dynkin diagram of the Narain lattice II1,17. More general algorithms to explore the moduli space are also developed. For d = 1 and 2 we list all the maximally enhanced gauge groups, moduli, and other relevant information about the embedding in IId,d+16. In agreement with the duality between heterotic on T2 and F-theory on K3, all possible gauge groups on T2 match all possible ADE types of singular fibers of elliptic K3 surfaces. We also present a simple method to transform the moduli under the duality group, and we build the map that relates the charge lattices and moduli of the compactification of the E8 × E8 and Spin(32)/ℤ2 heterotic theories.

Compactifications of the heterotic string on special Td/ℤ2 orbifolds realize a landscape of string models with 16 supercharges and a gauge group on the left-moving sector of reduced rank d + 8. The momenta of untwisted and twisted states span a lattice known as the Mikhailov lattice II(d), which is not self-dual for d > 1. By using computer algorithms which exploit the properties of lattice embeddings, we perform a systematic exploration of the moduli space for d ≤ 2, and give a list of maximally enhanced points where the U(1)d+8 enhances to a rank d + 8 non-Abelian gauge group. For d = 1, these groups are simply-laced and simply-connected, and in fact can be obtained from the Dynkin diagram of E10. For d = 2 there are also symplectic and doubly-connected groups. For the latter we find the precise form of their fundamental groups from embeddings of lattices into the dual of II(2). Our results easily generalize to d > 2.

We use a moduli space exploration algorithm to produce a complete list of maximally enhanced gauge groups that are realized in the heterotic string in 7d, encompassing the usual Narain component, and five other components with rank reduction realized via nontrivial holonomy triples. Using lattice embedding techniques we find an explicit match with the mechanism of singularity freezing in M-theory on K3. The complete global data for each gauge group is explicitly given.