Dynamical SUSY Breaking at Meta-Stable Minima from D-branes at Obstructed Geometries

TL;DR

This paper explores long-lived metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua in gauge theories with added massive flavors, providing explicit string theory constructions and analyzing specific models like the dP_1 theory.

Contribution

It introduces new metastable SUSY breaking vacua in flavored quiver gauge theories and offers a novel string theory realization using D7-branes and dimer techniques.

Findings

Existence of long-lived metastable vacua in flavored gauge theories.

Explicit string theory models constructed with D7-branes.

Analysis of the dP_1 quiver gauge theory case.

Abstract

We study the existence of long-lived meta-stable supersymmetry breaking vacua in gauge theories with massless quarks, upon the addition of extra massive flavors. A simple realization is provided by a modified version of SQCD with N_{f,0} < N_c massless flavors, N_{f,1} massive flavors and additional singlet chiral fields. This theory has local meta-stable minima separated from a runaway behavior at infinity by a potential barrier. We find further examples of such meta-stable minima in flavored versions of quiver gauge theories on fractional branes at singularities with obstructed complex deformations, and study the case of the dP_1 theory in detail. Finally, we provide an explicit String Theory construction of such theories. The additional flavors arise from D7-branes on non-compact 4-cycles of the singularity, for which we find a new efficient description using dimer techniques.