Supersymmetric embedding of antibrane polarization

Abstract

We study the supersymmetry breaking induced by probe anti-D3-branes at the tip of the Klebanov-Strassler throat geometry. Antibranes inside this geometry polarize and can be described by an NS5-brane wrapping an S 2 . When the number of antibranes is small compared to the background flux a metastable state exists that breaks supersymmetry. We present a manifestly supersymmetric effective model that realizes the polarized metastable state as a solution, spontaneously breaking the supersymmetry. The supersymmetric model relies crucially on the inclusion of Kaluza-Klein (matrix) degrees of freedom on the S 2 and two supersymmetric irrelevant deformations of N = 4 super-Yang-Mills (SYM), describing a large number of supersymmetric D3-branes in the IR. We explicitly identify the massless Goldstino and compute the spectrum of massive fluctuations around the metastable supersymmetry-breaking minimum, finding a Kaluza-Klein tower with masses warped down from the string scale. Below the Kaluza-Klein scale the massive tower can be integrated out and supersymmetry is realized nonlinearly. We comment on the effect of the Kaluza-Klein modes on the effective description of de Sitter vacua in string theory and inflationary model building.

The Landscape, the Swampland and the Era of Precision Cosmology

“…An advanced version of the KKLT uplifting has been developed more recently in [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. It is based on a manifest, nonlinearly realized, spontaneously broken, Volkov-Akulov type supersymmetry, discovered in 1972 [43].…”

“…The string theory interpretation of vacuum stabilization and uplifting, which is an important part of the advanced KKLT construction, was supported and explained in the SUSY 2015 talk by Polchinski [45]. In the advanced version of the KKLT construction [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], the single D3-brane has been represented at the phenomenological supergravity level by a nilpotent goldstino multiplet; see, for example, [46] and references therein.…”

“…Over the last 15 years, there have been many attempts to find another mechanism of vacuum stabilization in string theory, or to find an alternative, better way of addressing the cosmological constant problem. Most of these developments concentrated on finding other mechanisms of compactification [37,38], or developing a simpler mechanism of uplifting [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], but none of the efforts challenged the basic principles of the string landscape scenario.…”

“…Meanwhile, the latest critical discussions of string theory dS construction in [24,25] rely on the 33-year-old no-go theorem [35], and do not even mention the advanced versions of the KKLT construction [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. They miss the recent discovery that one can evade the no-go theorem [35] by introducing a single D3-brane.…”

de Sitter Extrema and the Swampland

“…However, the original KKLT and LVS scenarios have also been criticized throughout the years (see [5][6][7] for details and references). This criticism has cumulated into the recently stated dS swampland conjecture [8]1 1 This conjecture has been further studied and discussed in [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Here the scalar potential V is a function of the scalar fields φ i that arise in any given string theory compactification and the constant c is conjectured to be O (1).…”