D-terms on the resolved conifold

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new deformation of the warped resolved conifold with supersymmetry-breaking fluxes and D7-branes, exploring D-terms, F-theory lift, and potential inflationary applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel deformation of the resolved conifold with supersymmetry-breaking fluxes and D7-branes, including detailed analysis of D-terms and the F-theory lift.

Findings

D-terms are non-zero for certain D7-brane embeddings

Supersymmetry is broken without a bulk cosmological constant

F-theory lift maps (1,2) fluxes to non-primitive (2,2) flux

Abstract

We derive a novel deformation of the warped resolved conifold background with supersymmetry breaking ISD (1,2) fluxes by adding D7-branes to this type IIB theory. We find spontaneous supersymmetry breaking without generating a bulk cosmological constant. In the compactified form, our background will no longer be a Calabi-Yau manifold as it allows a non-vanishing first Chern class. In the presence of D7-branes the (1,2) fluxes can give rise to non-trivial D-terms. We study the Ouyang embedding of D7-branes in detail and find that in this case the D-terms are indeed non-zero. In the limit when we approach the singular conifold, the D-terms vanish for Ouyang's embedding, although supersymmetry appears to be broken. We also construct the F-theory lift of our background and demonstrate how these IIB (1,2) fluxes lift to non-primitive (2,2) flux on the fourfold. The seven branes correspond to normalisable harmonic forms. We briefly sketch a possible way to attain an inflaton potential in this background once extra D3-branes are introduced and point out some possibilities of restoring supersymmetry in our background that could in principle be used as the end point of the inflationary set-up. In a companion paper we will analyse in details the inflationary dynamics in this background.