Type II orientifold flux vacua in 3D

TL;DR

This paper systematically studies three-dimensional type II orientifold flux vacua, introducing simple models with stable vacua, including supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric AdS3 and Minkowski solutions, with potential implications for the Swampland Program.

Contribution

It develops a class of flux models (RSTU-models) in 3D that admit gauged supergravity descriptions and explores their stable vacua, including non-supersymmetric solutions with scale separation.

Findings

All vacua are perturbatively stable with no negative mass modes.

Existence of non-supersymmetric AdS3 vacua with controlled scale separation.

Vacua have integer conformal dimensions in the dual CFT2.

Abstract

We initiate a systematic study of type II orientifold flux vacua in three dimensions including gauge and metric fluxes, O-planes and D-branes. We derive simple flux models (we dub them RSTU-models) that admit a description in terms of gauged supergravities with half-maximal $\,\mathcal{N}=8\,$ supersymmetry in three dimensions. As a landscape appetizer, we present various multi-parametric families of supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric AdS$_{3}$ and Mkw$_{3}$ vacua. Remarkably, negative masses turn out to be always absent in the spectrum of scalar fluctuations, thus making all the vacua perturbatively stable within half-maximal supergravity. We provide examples of non-supersymmetric type IIB AdS$_{3}$ flux vacua which feature parametrically-controlled scale separation and come along with integer-valued conformal dimensions of the would-be dual CFT$_{2}$ operators. We also comment on the implications of our results in light of the Swampland Program.