 As an important example of this, contains a 3-form antisymmetric tensor with a 4-form field strength, and consequently prefers to compactify 7 or 4 of its space-like dimensions, so the large-scale spacetime must be either 4 or 7 dimensional, the former of which is attractive from a phenomenological perspective

Some important examples of Freund–Rubin compactification come from looking at the behavior of branes in string theory.Similar to the way that coupling to the electromagnetic field stabilizes electrically charged particles, the presence of antisymmetric tensor fields of various rank in a string theory stabilizes branes of various dimensions.In turn, the geometry of the spacetime near stacks of branes becomes warped in such a way that Freund–Rubin compactification is realized.