Meta-stable non-extremal anti-branes

We find new and compelling evidence for the meta-stability of SUSY-breaking states in holographic backgrounds whose consistency has been the source of ongoing disagreements in the literature. As a concrete example, we analyse anti-D3 branes at the tip of the Klebanov-Strassler (KS) throat. Using the blackfold formalism we examine how temperature affects the conjectured meta-stable state and determine whether and how the existing extremal results generalize when going beyond extremality. In the extremal limit we exactly recover the results of Kachru, Pearson and Verlinde (KPV), in a regime of parameter space that was previously inaccesible. Away from extremality we uncover a meta-stable black NS5 state that disappears near a geometric transition where black anti-D3 branes and black NS5 branes become indistinguishable. This is remarkably consistent with complementary earlier results based on the analysis of regularity conditions of backreacted solutions. We therefore provide highly non-trivial evidence for the meta-stability of anti-branes in non-compact throat geometries since we find a consistent picture over different regimes in parameter space.