Metastable Vacua in Brane Worlds

Stable and Metastable Vacua in Brane Constructions of SQCD

In a recent paper [1] we showed that N = 1 supersymmetric QCD in the presence of certain superpotential deformations has a rich landscape of supersymmetric and nonsupersymmetric vacua. In this paper we embed this theory in string theory as a low energy theory of intersecting NS and D-branes. We find that in the region of parameter space of brane configurations that can be reliably studied using...

Brane-worlds and theta vacua

Off-shell M5 Brane, Perturbed Seiberg-Witten Theory, and Metastable Vacua

We demonstrate that, in an appropriate limit, the off-shell M5-brane worldvolume action effectively captures the scalar potential of Seiberg-Witten theory perturbed by a small super-potential and, consequently, any nonsupersymmetric vacua that it describes. This happens in a similar manner to the emergence from M5's of the scalar potential describing certain type IIB flux configurations [1]. We...

Metastable Vacua, Geometrical Engineering and MQCD Transitions

We consider the geometrical engineering of the non-supersymmetric metastable vacua of N = 1 super Yang-Mills proposed in [8] and [22]. By T-duality they become N = 1 brane configurations. The identifications between gluino condensation and the geometry sizes for the configurations of [22] are studied by proceeding through the usual MQCD transitions. The geometrical description of the Seiberg du...

Intersecting Brane Worlds on Tori and Orbifolds

We review the construction and phenomenology of intersecting brane worlds. The breaking of chiral and supersymmetry together with a reduction of gauge symmetry by introducing D-branes at generic angles into type I or type II string compactifications is taken as a starting point for the engineering of phenomenologically appealing fourdimensional vacua. Examples that come very close to Standard M...