Topics in Supersymmetry Breaking and Gauge/Gravity Dualities

Citation

Park, Chang-Soon (2010) Topics in Supersymmetry Breaking and Gauge/Gravity Dualities. Dissertation (Ph.D.), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/9F6Q-ZT22. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:05042010-150716614

Abstract

The thesis covers two topics in string theory and quantum field theory. First, we realize metastable vacua in various supersymmetric gauge theories. Specifically, we consider the Coulomb branch of any N = 2 supersymmetric gauge theory, and perturb it by a superpotential and engineer a metastable vacuum at a point. We also study its relation to Kahler normal coordinates and Fayet-Iliopoulos terms. Having studied the metastable construction, we apply this to general gauge mediation. We show how to compute the current correlators when the hidden sector is strongly coupled in specific examples.

Next, we consider gauge/gravity dualities. We apply dualities to the investigation of various strongly coupled field theories. In one example, we construct M-theory supergravity solutions with the nonrelativistic Schroedinger symmetry starting from the warped AdS_5 metric with N = 1 supersymmetry. We impose that the lightlike direction is compact by making it a nontrivial U(1) bundle over the compact space. In another example, we show that, in a gravity theory with a Chern-Simons coupling, the Reissner-Nordstrom black hole in anti-de Sitter space is unstable depending on the value of the Chern-Simons coupling. The analysis suggests that the final configuration is likely to be a spatially modulated phase.

Thesis Files