Variations on the Warped Deformed Conifold

TL;DR

The paper analyzes the warped deformed conifold as a gravity dual to the cascading $SU(M(p+1))\times SU(Mp)$ gauge theory, demonstrating a super-Goldstone mechanism from spontaneous breaking of the global $U(1)_B$ by baryonic vevs and identifying a massless pseudo-scalar (and its scalar superpartner) in the supergravity spectrum. It then shows that D-strings correspond to global strings in the gauge theory, and, upon compactification, this global symmetry becomes gauged, yielding a SUSY Higgs mechanism in which the Goldstone boson is eaten and the D-strings map to Abrikosov–Nielsen–Olesen vortices. The work also constructs a scalar zero-mode dual to changing baryon vevs, proposes a family of resolved backgrounds breaking the ${\cal I}$ symmetry, and discusses how the baryonic branch aligns with the dual geometry. These results illuminate how Goldstone and Higgs phenomena arise within gauge/gravity duality for confining, chiral theories and suggest avenues for cosmological string realizations and explicit background constructions.

Abstract

The warped deformed conifold background of type IIB theory is dual to the cascading $SU(M(p+1))\times SU(Mp)$ gauge theory. We show that this background realizes the (super-)Goldstone mechanism where the U(1) baryon number symmetry is broken by expectation values of baryonic operators. The resulting massless pseudo-scalar and scalar glueballs are identified in the supergravity spectrum. A D-string is then dual to a global string in the gauge theory. Upon compactification, the Goldstone mechanism turns into the Higgs mechanism, and the global strings turn into ANO strings.