Metastable Nonextremal Antibranes

Abstract

We find new and compelling evidence for the metastability of supersymmetry-breaking states in holographic backgrounds whose consistency has been the source of ongoing disagreements in the literature. As a concrete example, we analyze anti-D3 branes at the tip of the Klebanov-Strassler throat. Using the blackfold formalism we examine how temperature affects the conjectured metastable state and determine whether and how the existing extremal results generalize when going beyond extremality. In the extremal limit we exactly recover the results of Kachru, Pearson, and Verlinde, in a regime of parameter space that was previously inaccessible. Away from extremality we uncover a metastable black Neveu-Schwarz five-brane (NS5) state that disappears near a geometric transition where black anti-D3 branes and black NS5 branes become indistinguishable. This is remarkably consistent with complementary earlier results based on the analysis of regularity conditions of backreacted solutions. We therefore provide highly nontrivial evidence for the metastability of antibranes in noncompact throat geometries since we find a consistent picture over different regimes in parameter space.

No-scale and scale-separated flux vacua from IIA on G2 orientifolds

“…Anti-D2-branes are then the natural SUSY-breaking uplift ingredient for which a probe computation à la [54] would suggest the solutions can be metastable. However this probe computation has been refuted in [55], but that criticism in turn was argued to be essentially harmless because of the arguments in [56][57][58][59], although other problems associated to anti-brane uplifting could persist as reviewed in [6].…”

Classical de Sitter solutions in three dimensions without tachyons?

“…Not only due to possible strong coupling effects but also the classical backreaction of the anti-branes (see [69] for some pioneering work) could be a worry and potentially enhance the instabilities [70]. However non-trivial evidence in favor of the probe action results came from the complementary blackfold treatments carried out in [71][72][73] as well as from arguments pointing to the absence of dangerous singularities due to backreaction [68,[74][75][76]. It is however quite likely that the actual bounds are a bit more strict than the probe results.…”

Comments on the stability of the KPV state

“…By choosing the stacked anti-D3-NS5 branes solution as the near zone seed, we have effectively ignored all brane splitting and fragmentation deformations. Moreover, as noted in [10], the analysis is reliable when p/M is not too close to zero, at which point the NS5 brane shrinks and the localised anti-D3 perspective becomes the better description. Since the analysis in [6] is done from the localised anti-D3 branes perspective and the discovered instabilities are brane splitting instabilities, the blackfold results presented here should be thought of as complimentary and not contradictory to that of [6].…”

“…Subsequently, [9] observed that singularities are not expected to appear once we consider extremal anti-D3-NS5 branes. Treating backreaction perturbatively through the blackfold approach, [10] showed evidence of the existence of the KPV configuration exactly where no-go theorems are evaded. More precisely, it was found that the polarised anti-D3-NS5 branes could form a metastable state at the tip of the throat, and such solution would disappear as soon as we heat up the polarised state sufficiently that it geometrically resembles localised black anti-D3 branes.…”

“…It is important to note that the claim regarding metastability of the relevant anti-D3-NS5 state in [3] and subsequently in [10] is only with respect to some modes of deformations and not a general statement of stability. For example, in [10], only spherically homogeneous transformations were considered. This means spherically non-homogeneous deformations of the KPV state were ignored.…”