Higher order corrections to KPV: The nonabelian brane stack perspective

In this work, we study the decay of $\overline{D3}$-branes in the setup of Kachru, Pearson, and Verlinde (KPV) at higher order in $\alpha'$ from the perspective of a nonabelian $\overline{D3}$-brane stack. We extend the leading order analysis of KPV by including higher order commutators as well as higher derivative corrections. Recently, the KPV setup has been studied at higher order in $\alpha'$ from the NS5-brane perspective. It was found that in order to control $\alpha'$ corrections the quantity $g_sM^2$ determining the amount of warping in the Klebanov-Strassler throat has to be much larger than expected. This leads to serious issues when using the $\overline{D3}$-branes as an uplift to dS. The benefit of the analysis in this work is that the $\overline{D3}$-brane perspective is controlled when the distance between the branes inside the brane stack is substringy which is a regime not controlled on the NS5-brane side. As a main result, we find that the strong bound $g_sM^2\sim \mathcal{O}(100)$ obtained on the NS5-brane also holds in the regime accessible from the $\overline{D3}$-brane perspective. We also show that the novel way of uplifting proposed in the recent work on $\alpha'$ corrections to the KPV setup can only work for small warped throats.