Static Domain Walls in N=1 Supergravity

TL;DR

This paper investigates supersymmetric domain walls in N=1 supergravity, revealing new static and reflection asymmetric solutions, and highlighting gravity's crucial role in the properties of topological defects.

Contribution

It introduces a new class of domain wall solutions in supergravity with modular-invariant superpotentials, expanding the classification of such defects.

Findings

Domain walls saturate the Bogomol'nyi bound.

Discovery of static and reflection asymmetric solutions.

Examples of global supersymmetric domain walls without gravity analogs.

Abstract

We study supersymmetric domain walls in N=1 supergravity theories, including those with modular-invariant superpotentials arising in superstring compactifications. Such domain walls are shown to saturate the Bogomol'nyi bound of wall energy per unit area. We find \sl static \rm and \sl reflection asymmetric \rm domain wall solutions of the self-duality equations for the metric and the matter fields. Our result establishes a new class of domain walls beyond those previously classified. As a corollary, we define a precise notion of vacuum degeneracy in the supergravity theories. In addition, we found examples of global supersymmetric domain walls that do not have an analog when gravity is turned on. This result establishes that in the case of extended topological defects gravity plays a crucial, nontrivial role.