Related papers: Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical su…
Dynamical properties of gauge theories with light flavor quarks are studied in a dual supergravity by adding a D7-brane probe into the AdS background deformed by the dilaton. By estimating the vev of flavor quark-bilinear in both the…
We discuss supersymmetry breaking in the field-theoretical limit of the strongly-coupled heterotic string compactified on a Calabi-Yau manifold, from the different perspectives of four and five dimensions. The former applies to light…
We study effective quiver gauge theories arising from a stack of D3-branes on certain Calabi-Yau singularities. Our point of view is a first principle approach via open topological string theory. This means that we construct the natural…
Dynamical electro-weak symmetry breaking is an appealing, strongly-coupled alternative to the weakly-coupled models based on an elementary scalar field developing a vacuum expectation value. In the first two sections of this set of…
A novel method is presented which employs advanced numerical techniques used in the engineering sciences to find and study the properties of nontrivial vacua of gauged extended supergravity models. While this method only produces…
In the context of the field theory limit of superstrings, we consider an almost realistic model of supersymmetry breaking by gaugino condensation which includes, through nonperturbative corrections to the K\"ahler potential, dilaton…
We construct a gravity dual to a system with multiple (2+1)-dimensional layers in a (3+1)-dimensional ambient theory. Following a top-down approach, we generate a geometry corresponding to the intersection of D3- and D5-branes along 2+1…
We study supergravity backgrounds encoded through the gauge/string correspondence by the SU(N) \times SU(N) theory arising on N D3-branes on the conifold. As discussed in hep-th/9905104, the dynamics of this theory describes warped versions…
The generalisation of the rigid special geometry of the vector multiplet quantum moduli space to the case of supergravity is discussed through the notion of a dynamical Calabi--Yau threefold. Duality symmetries of this manifold are…
Recently a strong-weak coupling duality in non-abelian non-supersymmetric theories in four dimensions has been found. An analogous procedure is reviewed, which allows to find the `dual action' to the gauge theory of dynamical gravity…
We discuss the use of gauge fields to stabilize complex structure moduli in Calabi-Yau three-fold compactifications of heterotic string and M-theory. The requirement that the gauge fields in such models preserve supersymmetry leads to a…
We study theories with sixteen supercharges and a discrete energy spectrum. One class of theories has symmetry group $SU(2|4)$. They arise as truncations of ${\cal N}=4$ super Yang Mills. They include the plane wave matrix model, 2+1 super…
The low energy gauge theory living on D-branes probing a del Pezzo singularity of a non-compact Calabi-Yau manifold is not unique. In fact there is a large equivalence class of such gauge theories related by Seiberg duality. As a step…
We study the dynamics of a large class of N=1 quiver theories, geometrically realized by type IIB D-brane probes wrapping cycles of local Calabi-Yau threefolds. These include N=2 (affine) A-D-E quiver theories deformed by superpotential…
We study the correspondence between AdS$_3$ massive IIA supergravity vacua and two-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=(0,4)$ quiver quantum field theories. After categorizing all kinds of gravity solutions, we demystify the ones that seem to reflect…
In Calabi-Yau fourfold compactifications of M-theory with flux, we investigate the possibility of partial supersymmetry breaking in the three-dimensional effective theory. To this end, we place the effective theory in the framework of…
We study the classical geometry associated to fractional D3-branes of type IIB string theory on R^4/Z_2 which provide the gravitational dual for N=2 super Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. As one can expect from the lack of conformal…
Using the AdS/CFT correspondence we study vacua of N=4 SYM for which part of the gauge symmetry is broken by expectation values of scalar fields. A specific subclass of such vacua can be analyzed with gauged supergravity and the…
The gauge transformations of p-form fields in supergravity theories acquire a non-commuting character when one introduces potentials both for the theory's original field strengths and for their duals. This has previously been shown in the…
We construct metastable configurations of branes and anti-branes wrapping 2-spheres inside local Calabi-Yau manifolds and study their large N duals. These duals are Calabi-Yau manifolds in which the wrapped 2-spheres have been replaced by…