Orientifolds and duality cascades: confinement before the wall

TL;DR

This paper explores how orientifold singularities in D-brane setups lead to finite duality cascades and stabilization of runaway directions, expanding the landscape of gauge theories from string theory.

Contribution

It identifies unique properties of orientifold singularities, notably finite duality cascades and stabilization of runaway directions, not common in other Calabi-Yau singularities.

Findings

Duality cascades are finite in orientifold cases.

Orientifolds stabilize runaway directions.

Implications for gauge theory diversity.

Abstract

We consider D-branes at orientifold singularities and discuss two properties of the corresponding low energy four-dimensional effective theories which are not shared, generically, by other Calabi-Yau singularities. The first property is that duality cascades are finite and, unlike ordinary ones, do not require an infinite number of degrees of freedom to be UV-completed. The second is that orientifolds tend to stabilize runaway directions. These two properties can have interesting implications and widen in an intriguing way the variety of gauge theories one can describe using D-branes.