Landscape of Supersymmetry Breaking Vacua in Geometrically Realized Gauge Theories

TL;DR

This paper explores the vacuum landscape of certain supersymmetric gauge theories realized via D-branes on Calabi-Yau manifolds, revealing metastable vacua with broken supersymmetry and stabilized moduli, and analyzing their decay properties.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of a rich landscape of metastable vacua in geometrically realized gauge theories with detailed dual descriptions and supersymmetry breaking mechanisms.

Findings

Identification of metastable vacua with broken supersymmetry

All moduli are stabilized in these vacua

Decay rates to supersymmetric vacua can be parametrically small

Abstract

We study vacuum structure of N=1 supersymmetric quiver gauge theories which can be realized geometrically by D brane probes wrapping cycles of local Calabi-Yau three-folds. In particular, we show that the A_2 quiver theory with gauge group U(N_1) \times U(N_2) with N_1 / 2 < N_2 < 2N_1 / 3 has a regime with an infrared free description that is partially magnetic and partially electric. Using this dual description, we show that the model has a landscape of inequivalent meta-stable vacua where supersymmetry is dynamically broken and all the moduli are stabilized. Each vacuum has distinct unbroken gauge symmetry. B-terms generated by the supersymmetry breaking give rise to gaugino masses at one-loop, and we are left with the bosonic pure Yang-Mills theory in the infrared. We also identify the supersymmetric vacua in this model using their infrared free descriptions and show that the decay rates of the supersymmetry breaking vacua into the supersymmetric vacua can be made parametrically small.