Coisotropic D8-branes and model-building

Up to now chiral type IIA vacua have been mostly based on intersecting D6-branes wrapping special Lagrangian 3-cycles on a CY3 manifold. We argue that there are additional BPS D-branes which have so far been neglected, and which seem to have interesting model-building features. They are coisotropic D8-branes, in the sense of Kapustin and Orlov. The D8-branes wrap 5-dimensional submanifolds of the CY3 which are trivial in homology, but contain a worldvolume flux that induces D6-brane charge on them. This induced D6-brane charge not only renders the D8-brane BPS, but also creates D = 4 chirality when two D8-branes intersect. We discuss in detail the case of a type IIA T6/(Z2 x Z2) orientifold, where we provide explicit examples of coisotropic D8-branes. We study the chiral spectrum, SUSY conditions, and effective field theory of different systems of D8-branes in this orientifold, and show how the magnetic fluxes generate a superpotential for untwisted Kaehler moduli. Finally, using both D6-branes and coisotropic D8-branes we construct new examples of MSSM-like type IIA vacua