Metastable Vacua and the Backreacted Stenzel Geometry

TL;DR

This paper constructs a supergravity dual to a metastable state involving anti-M2 branes in a warped Stenzel space, analyzing linearized deformations and identifying IR singularities.

Contribution

It provides an analytical solution for non-supersymmetric deformations around warped Stenzel space, modeling backreacting anti-M2 branes and exploring their IR and UV behavior.

Findings

UV behavior matches the metastable state expectations

IR solution exhibits a flux singularity

Identifies supergravity parameters corresponding to anti-M2 branes

Abstract

We construct an M-theory background dual to the metastable state recently discussed by Klebanov and Pufu, which corresponds to placing a stack of anti-M2 branes at the tip of a warped Stenzel space. With this purpose we analytically solve for the linearized non-supersymmetric deformations around the warped Stenzel space, preserving the SO(5) symmetries of the supersymmetric background, and which interpolate between the IR and UV region. We identify the supergravity solution which corresponds to a stack of $\bar{N}$ backreacting anti-M2 branes by fixing all the 12 integration constants in terms of $\bar{N}$. While in the UV this solution has the desired features to describe the conjectured metastable state of the dual (2+1)-dimensional theory, in the IR it suffers from a singularity in the four-form flux, which we describe in some details.