M-Branes and Metastable States

TL;DR

This paper investigates metastable supersymmetry-breaking states in M-theory backgrounds with fluxes, demonstrating their long-lived nature and decay mechanisms via brane polarization and Euclidean bounce solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a new metastable supersymmetry-breaking state in M-theory with fluxes and analyzes its decay using Euclidean bounce solutions, extending understanding of flux compactifications.

Findings

Metastable states are long-lived with decay rates computed.

Brane polarization leads to supersymmetry breaking and metastability.

Decay described by Euclidean bounce solutions in M5-brane theory.

Abstract

We study a supersymmetry breaking deformation of the M-theory background found in arXiv:hep-th/0012011. The supersymmetric solution is a warped product of R^{2,1} and the 8-dimensional Stenzel space, which is a higher dimensional generalization of the deformed conifold. At the bottom of the warped throat there is a 4-sphere threaded by \tilde{M} units of 4-form flux. The dual (2+1)-dimensional theory has a discrete spectrum of bound states. We add p anti-M2 branes at a point on the 4-sphere, and show that they blow up into an M5-brane wrapping a 3-sphere at a fixed azimuthal angle on the 4-sphere. This supersymmetry breaking state turns out to be metastable for p / \tilde{M} < 0.054. We find a smooth O(3)-symmetric Euclidean bounce solution in the M5-brane world volume theory that describes the decay of the false vacuum. Calculation of the Euclidean action shows that the metastable state is extremely long-lived. We also describe the corresponding metastable states and their decay in the type IIA background obtained by reduction along one of the spatial directions of R^{2,1}.