A tale of two cascades: Higgsing and Seiberg-duality cascades from type IIB string theory

TL;DR

This work constructs explicit type IIB supergravity solutions with brane sources that dualize to N=1 field theories featuring a Seiberg-duality cascade in the UV and a finite-range Higgsing cascade in the intermediate regime, culminating in IR confinement with a smooth end of space. By starting from a wrapped-D5 system and applying a solution-generating rotation, the authors obtain UV-complete backgrounds connected to KS/BGMPZ, with a controllable distribution of flavor sources encoded by a profile S(ρ). They analyze two classes of solutions (exact and semi-analytic), study the resulting field-theory dynamics, compute holographic central charges, and propose UV-tail profiles to tame the high-energy behavior, highlighting potential applications to dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking and tumbling-like dynamics in strongly coupled gauge theories.

Abstract

We construct explicitly new solutions of type IIB supergravity with brane sources, the duals of which are N = 1 supersymmetric field theories exhibiting two very interesting phenomena. The far UV dynamics is controlled by a cascade of Seiberg dualities analogous to the Klebanov- Strassler backgrounds. At intermediate scales a cascade of Higgsing appears, in the sense that the gauge group undergoes a sequence of spontaneous symmetry breaking steps which reduces its rank. Deep in the IR, the theory confines, and the gravity background has a non-singular end of space. We explain in detail how to generate such solutions, discuss some of the Physics associated with them and briefly comment on the possible applications.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: We plot an example of a possible D5-brane configuration: a total of $N_f$ D5s extend in the radial coordinate from some minimum $\rho$, that can lie between $\rho_*$ and $\rho_{**}$, to infinity. We chose a distribution of minimal radial distances of the D5s that is homogeneous in $\rho$, as indicated by the dotted oblique line. This configuration of D5s gives rise to the plotted $S(\rho)$, which is asymptotically constant ($S(\rho)\rightarrow1$).
• Figure 2: After the rotation, D3-brane charge is induced on the D5s. As argued in Section \ref{['twokinds']}, this charge grows exponentially with the radial distance. An asymptotically constant profile $S(\rho)$ will generate an infinite amount D3-brane charge.
• Figure 3: Plot of the profile function (\ref{['vvvvzzzz']}). The function $S(\rho)$ starts growing for small $\rho$, reaches a maximum, and then decreases exponentially for large values of the holographic coordinate.
• Figure 4: For the case $N_c = N_f =2$ and $h_1 = 5$, we show the functions defining the semi-analytic rotated background. The choice of $S(\rho)$ is the one specified in the text (eq. (\ref{['vvvvzzzz']})).
• Figure 5: Plots of the function $c(\rho)$ for $N_c = N_f =2$ and $h_1 = 5$. We considered the backgrounds of Section \ref{['semianalyticdetails']}.