Exotic polarizations of D2 branes and oblique vacua of (S)YM$_{2+1}$

TL;DR

This paper studies oblique vacua in a perturbed 2+1D gauge theory on D2 branes, revealing the role of D4 charge in brane polarization and stability, with implications for gauge/gravity duality.

Contribution

It demonstrates the importance of D4 charge in D2 to NS5 brane polarization and clarifies the stability of various vacua in the presence of fermion and scalar mass perturbations.

Findings

Oblique vacua exist for certain scalar mass ranges.

D4 charge is crucial for understanding D2 to NS5 polarization.

Some metastable vacua are unstable and decay via D4 charge acquisition.

Abstract

We investigate the oblique vacua in the perturbed 2+1 dimensional gauge theory living on D2 branes. The string theory dual of these vacua is expected to correspond to polarizations of the D2 branes into NS5 branes with D4 brane charge. We perturb the gauge theory by adding fermions masses. In the nonsupersymmetric case, we also consider the effect of slight variations of the masses of the scalars. For certain ranges of scalar masses we find oblique vacua. We show that D4 charge is an essential ingredient in understanding D2 -> NS5 polarizations. We find that some of the polarization states which appear as metastable vacua when D4 charge is not considered are in fact unstable. They decay by acquiring D4 charge, tilting and shrinking to zero size.