Backtracking AdS flux vacua

TL;DR

The paper presents a novel algorithm called "flux backtracking" that reconstructs brane configurations from AdS flux vacua, providing insights into their holographic duals and singularity structures.

Contribution

Introduces a new algorithm to reverse-engineer brane setups from AdS flux vacua, aiding in understanding their holographic duals and singularities.

Findings

Flux backtracking recovers known AdS/CFT pairs.

Produces a strongly coupled singularity for DGKT vacua.

Finds a weakly coupled singularity in certain scale-separated solutions.

Abstract

We introduce an algorithm (dubbed "flux backtracking") to reverse-engineer the brane picture from an AdS flux vacuum. Given an AdS flux vacuum as input, the algorithm outputs a singularity in 10 or 11 dimensions. This singularity has the property that when probed with the appropriate stack of branes (and after taking the near-horizon limit), one recovers the initial AdS vacuum. After testing the procedure on a number of known AdS/CFT pairs, we apply it to AdS flux vacua without known holographic dual, notably the scale-separated DGKT solution. In this case, flux backtracking produces a certain strongly coupled singularity in massive IIA; we conjecture that the worldvolume CFT of D4-branes probing this singularity should be the holographic CFT dual to DGKT (if it exists). Applying the procedure to the DGKT-related scale-separated AdS$_4$ solutions without Romans mass, we find instead a conical and weakly coupled singularity. We also comment on the results and limitations of applying the procedure to KKLT.