Multi-Flux Warped Throats and Cascading Gauge Theories

TL;DR

This paper explores duality cascades and their infrared behavior in gauge theories from D3-branes at complex cone singularities, showing how strong IR dynamics smooth out singularities and produce multi-scale warped throat geometries.

Contribution

It introduces new duality cascade solutions for complex cone singularities, including irrational R-charge cases, and links gauge theory IR dynamics to supergravity throat geometries.

Findings

Infrared deformations lead to smooth geometries from singular initial setups.

Explicit duality cascades constructed for irrational R-charge theories.

Multi-scale warped throats with multiple radial regions described.

Abstract

We describe duality cascades and their infrared behavior for systems of D3-branes at singularities given by complex cones over del Pezzo surfaces (and related examples), in the presence of fractional branes. From the gauge field theory viewpoint, we show that D3-branes probing the infrared theory have a quantum deformed moduli space, given by a complex deformation of the initial geometry to a simpler one. This implies that for the dual supergravity viewpoint, the gauge theory strong infrared dynamics smoothes out the naked singularities of the recently constructed warped throat solutions with 3-form fluxes, describing the cascading RG flow of the gauge theory. This behavior thus generalizes the Klebanov-Strassler deformation of the conifold. We describe several explicit examples, including models with several scales of strong gauge dynamics. In the regime of widely separated scales, the dual supergravity solutions should correspond to throats with several radial regions with different exponential warp factors. These rich throat geometries are expected to have interesting applications in compactification and model building. Along our studies, we also construct explicit duality cascades for gauge theories with irrational R-charges, obtained from D-branes probing complex cones over dP1 and dP2.