On the Stability of Non-Extremal Conifold Backgrounds with Sources

TL;DR

This paper constructs finite temperature supergravity backgrounds with wrapped D5 branes and flavor sources, analyzes their stability, and finds they are thermodynamically unstable, impacting their use as duals for certain field theories.

Contribution

It introduces new non-extremal flavored resolved conifold solutions with stabilized dilaton and studies their thermodynamic stability, a step toward understanding their dual field theories.

Findings

The solutions have stabilized dilaton at finite value.

They are thermodynamically unstable based on specific heat analysis.

Results also apply to some Klebanov-Strassler asymptotic backgrounds.

Abstract

We present finite temperature solutions describing N_c D5 branes wrapped on the S^2 of the resolved conifold in the presence of N_f flavor brane sources and their backreaction, i.e. N_f/N_c ~ 1. In these solutions the dilaton does not blow up at infinity but stabilizes to a finite value. Thus, we can use them to generate new ones with D5 and D3 charge. The resulting backgrounds are non-extremal versions of the "flavored" resolved deformed conifold. It is tempting to interpret these solutions as gravity duals of finite temperature field theories exhibiting non-trivial phenomena as Seiberg dualities, Higgsing and confinement. However, a first necessary step in this direction is to investigate their stability. We study the specific heat of these new flavored backgrounds and find that they are thermodynamically unstable. Our results on the stability also apply to some of the non-extremal backgrounds with Klebanov-Strassler asymptotics found in the literature.