Massive IIA flux compactifications with dynamical open strings

TL;DR

This paper explores massive type IIA flux compactifications with open strings on D6 branes, revealing new stable AdS4 vacua and analyzing their properties within a gauged supergravity framework.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to include open string dynamics in flux compactifications, leading to the discovery of new AdS4 vacua with stability analysis.

Findings

Found new supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric AdS4 vacua.

Identified some non-supersymmetric vacua as perturbatively stable.

Connected scalar potential terms to non-Abelian brane actions.

Abstract

We consider massive type IIA compactifications down to 4 dimensions in presence of O6 planes and D6 branes parallel to them, in order to preserve half-maximal supersymmetry in 4D. The dynamics of open strings living on the spacetime filling branes is taken into account, in the gauged supergravity description, by adding extra vector multiplets and embedding tensor components. The scalar potential gets new terms that can be matched with contributions coming from dimensional reduction of the non-Abelian DBI and WZ brane actions. In this setting, we analyze the vacuum structure of the theory and find novel AdS$_4$ vacua, both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric ones. Furthermore, we address their perturbative stability by computing their mass spectra. Some of the vacua are found to be perturbatively stable, despite their being non-supersymmetric. We conclude by discussing the reliability of our setup in terms of higher-derivative corrections.