Metastable vacua and D-branes at the conifold

Abstract

We consider quiver gauge theories arising on D-branes at simple Calabi-Yau singularities (quotients of the conifold). These theories have metastable supersymmetry breaking vacua. The field theoretic mechanism is basically the one exhibited by the examples of Intriligator, Seiberg and Shih in SUSY QCD. In a dual description, the SUSY breaking is captured by the presence of anti-branes. In comparison to our earlier related work, the main improvements of the present construction are that we can reach the free magnetic range of the SUSY QCD theory where the existence of the metastable vacua is on firm footing, and we can see explicitly how the small masses for the quark flavors (necessary to the existence of the SUSY breaking vacua) are dynamically stabilized. One crucial mass term is generated by a stringy instanton. Finally, our models naturally incorporate R-symmetry breaking in the non-supersymmetric vacuum, in a way similar to the examples of Kitano, Ooguri and Ookouchi.