Polarised antibranes from Smarr relations

TL;DR

This paper derives Smarr relations for anti M2-branes in the CGLP background, revealing conditions for regular horizons and potential polarisation into M5-branes, with implications for their stability and regularity.

Contribution

It provides a new Smarr relation framework for backreacted antibranes and analyzes their horizon regularity and polarisation possibilities.

Findings

Smeared extremal antibranes cannot have regular horizons.

Localized M2-branes may be regular when polarised into M5-branes.

Finite temperature solutions with regular horizons are not ruled out.

Abstract

We study the backreaction of smeared and localised anti M2-branes placed at the tip of the CGLP background. To this end we derive a Smarr relation for backreacted antibranes at zero and finite temperature. For extremal antibranes we show that if smeared they cannot have regular horizons, whereas localised M2-branes can potentially be regular when polarised into M5-branes, in agreement with the probe result of Klebanov and Pufu. We further discuss antibranes at finite temperature and argue that localised antibrane solutions with regular horizons are not excluded.