Abstract
In flux compactifications of type IIB string theory with D3 and seven-branes, the negative induced D3 charge localized on seven-branes leads to an apparently pathological profile of the metric sufficiently close to the source. With the volume modulus stabilized in a KKLT de Sitter vacuum this pathological region takes over a significant part of the entire compactification, threatening to spoil the KKLT effective field theory. In this paper we employ the Seiberg-Witten solution of pure SU(N) super Yang-Mills theory to argue that wrapped seven-branes can be thought of as bound states of more microscopic exotic branes. We argue that the low-energy worldvolume dynamics of a stack of n such exotic branes is given by the (A1, An−1) Argyres-Douglas theory. Moreover, the splitting of the perturbative (in α′) seven-brane into its constituent branes at the non-perturbative level resolves the apparently pathological region close to the seven-brane and replaces it with a region of \( \mathcal{O} \)(1) Einstein frame volume. While this region generically takes up an \( \mathcal{O} \)(1) fraction of the compactification in a KKLT de Sitter vacuum we argue that a small flux superpotential dynamically ensures that the 4d effective field theory of KKLT remains valid nevertheless.
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Carta, F., Moritz, J. Resolving spacetime singularities in flux compactifications & KKLT. J. High Energ. Phys. 2021, 93 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2021)093
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2021)093