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 classical string theory, the vacuum structure is qualitatively similar to that in the field theory regime. Effects that in field theory come from one loop corrections arise in string theory as classical gravitational effects. The brane construction provides a useful guide to the structure of stable and metastable gauge theory vacua.