We revisit necessary conditions for gluing local (anti-)D3 throats into flux throats with opposite charge. These consistency conditions typically reveal singularities in the 3-form fluxes whose meaning is being debated. In this note we prove, under wellmotivated assumptions, that unphysical singularities can potentially be avoided when the anti-branes polarise into spherical NS5 branes, with a specific radius. If a consistent solution can then indeed be found, our analysis seems to suggests a rather large correction to the radius of the polarization sphere compared to the probe result. We furthermore comment on the gluing conditions at finite temperature and point out that one specific assumption of a recent no-go theorem can be broken if anti-branes are indeed to polarise into spherical NS5 branes at zero temperature.

We study the backreaction of smeared and localised anti M2-branes placed at the tip of the CGLP background. To this end we derive a Smarr relation for backreacted antibranes at zero and finite temperature. For extremal antibranes we show that if smeared they cannot have regular horizons, whereas localised M2-branes can potentially be regular when polarised into M5-branes, in agreement with the probe result of Klebanov and Pufu. We further discuss antibranes at finite temperature and argue that localised antibrane solutions with regular horizons are not excluded.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figure

Supersymmetry‐breaking is a key ingredient for string theory models to be phenomenologically viable. We review the strong analogy in the physics and methods used for describing non‐supersymmetric flux vacua and non‐supersymmetric black holes in string theory. We also show how the polarized state could be the key to describing a well‐behaved back‐reaction of anti‐branes in flux backgrounds, shedding a new light on a recent debate in the literature.

Subtracted geometries are black hole solutions of the four dimensional STU model with rather interesting ties to asymptotically flat black holes. A peculiar feature is that the solutions to the Klein-Gordon equation on this subtracted background can be organized according to representations of the conformal group SO(2, 2). We test if this behavior persists for the linearized fluctuations of gravitational and matter fields on static, electrically charged backgrounds of this kind. We find that there is a subsector of the modes that do display conformal symmetry, while some modes do not. We also discuss two different effective actions that describe these subtracted geometries and how the spectrum of quasinormal modes is dramatically different depending upon the action used.

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