In a recent paper [1] we showed that N=1 supersymmetric QCD in the presence of certain superpotential deformations has a rich landscape of supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric vacua. In this paper we embed this theory in string theory as a low energ
y theory of intersecting NS and D-branes. We find that in the region of parameter space of brane configurations that can be reliably studied using classical string theory, the vacuum structure is qualitatively similar to that in the field theory regime. Effects that in field theory come from one loop corrections arise in string theory as classical gravitational effects. The brane construction provides a useful guide to the structure of stable and metastable gauge theory vacua.
We argue that tachyon-free type I string vacua with supersymmetry breaking in the open sector at the string scale can be interpreted, via S and T-duality arguments, as metastable vacua of supersymmetric type I superstring. The dynamics of the process
can be partially captured via nucleation of brane-antibrane pairs out of the non-supersymmetric vacuum and subsequent tachyon condensation.
We study the geometric interpretation of metastable vacua for systems of D3 branes at non isolated toric deformable singularities. Using the L^{aba} examples, we investigate the relations between the field theoretic susy breaking and restoration and the complex deformations of the CY singularities.
We investigate the recent suggestion that a Minkowski vacuum is either absolutely stable, or it has a divergent decay rate and thus fails to have a locally Minkowski description. The divergence comes from boost integration over momenta of the vacuum
bubbles. We point out that a prototypical example of false-vacuum decay is pair production in a uniform electric field, so if the argument leading to the divergence is correct, it should apply to this case as well. We provide evidence that no catastrophic vacuum instability occurs in a constant electric field, indicating that the argument cannot be right. Instead, we argue that the boost integration that leads to the divergence is unnecessary: when all possible fluctuations of the vacuum bubble are included, the quantum state of the bubble is invariant under Lorentz boosts.
In this paper we consider quiver gauge theories with fractional branes whose infrared dynamics removes the classical supersymmetric vacua (DSB branes). We show that addition of flavors to these theories (via additional non-compact branes) leads to lo
cal meta-stable supersymmetry breaking minima, closely related to those of SQCD with massive flavors. We simplify the study of the one-loop lifting of the accidental classical flat directions by direct computation of the pseudomoduli masses via Feynman diagrams. This new approach allows to obtain analytic results for all these theories. This work extends the results for the $dP_1$ theory in hep-th/0607218. The new approach allows to generalize the computation to general examples of DSB branes, and for arbitrary values of the superpotential couplings.