On Metastable Branes and a New Type of Magnetic Monopole

Abstract

String compactifications with D-branes may exhibit regular magnetic monopole solutions, whose presence does not rely on broken non-abelian gauge symmetry. These stringy monopoles exist on interesting metastable brane configurations, such as anti-D3 branes inside a flux compactification or D5-branes wrapping 2-cycles that are locally stable but globally trivial. In brane realizations of SM-like gauge theories, the monopoles carry one unit of magnetic hypercharge. Their mass can range from the string scale down to the multi-TeV regime.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: The typical profile of the area $A(\phi)$, effective D3-charge $B(\phi)$, tension $V(\phi)$, and total potential energy $V_{tot}(\phi)$ of the D5-brane as a function of the transverse location $\phi$.
• Figure 2: The D5-brane configuration that describes the smooth monopole solution. The D5 world brane wraps the trivial 2-cycle $\alpha$, but near the origin unwraps via the 3-chain $\Gamma$.