Old and new vacua of 5D maximal supergravity

TL;DR

This paper explores the critical points of 5D maximal supergravity with U(2) symmetry, discovering new vacua and analyzing their properties analytically, including mass spectra and cosmological constants.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of varying the embedding tensor to find vacua, recovering known solutions and identifying four new vacua with diverse gauge groups and cosmological constants.

Findings

Recovered all previously known vacua.

Discovered four new vacua with different gauge groups.

Provided the first example with vacua having positive and zero cosmological constants.

Abstract

We look for critical points with U(2) residual symmetry in 5-dimensional maximally supersymmetric gauged supergravity, by varying the embedding tensor, rather than directly minimizing the scalar potential. We recover all previously known vacua and we find four new vacua, with different gauge groups and cosmological constants. We provide the first example of a maximal supergravity model in $D \geq 4$ having critical points with both positive and vanishing cosmological constant. For each vacuum we also compute the full mass spectrum. All results are analytic.