Brane Potentials and Moduli Spaces

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between supergravity moduli spaces of certain brane systems and Coulomb branches of gauge theories, highlighting the role of potentials generated by background probing and the Scherk-Schwarz mechanism.

Contribution

It demonstrates the equivalence of supergravity moduli spaces with gauge theory Coulomb branches and analyzes potential terms arising from background probes and supersymmetric brane configurations.

Findings

Supergravity moduli spaces match Coulomb branches of gauge theories.

Potential terms often originate from the Scherk-Schwarz mechanism.

Examples of novel supersymmetric brane configurations are provided.

Abstract

It is shown that the supergravity moduli spaces of D1-D5 and D2-D6 brane systems coincide with those of the Coulomb branches of the associated non-abelian gauge theories. We further discuss situations in which worldvolume brane actions include a potential term generated by probing certain supergravity backgrounds. We find that in many cases, the appearance of the potential is due to the application of the Scherk-Schwarz mechanism. We give some examples and discuss the existence of novel supersymmetric brane configurations.