N=4 supersymmetric AdS(5) vacua and their moduli spaces

We classify the N = 4 supersymmetric AdS(5) backgrounds that arise as solutions of five-dimensional N = 4 gauged supergravity. We express our results in terms of the allowed embedding tensor components and identify the structure of the associated gauge groups. We show that the moduli space of these AdS vacua is of the form SU(1, m)/ (U(1) x SU(m)) and discuss our results regarding holographically dual N = 2 SCFTs and their conformal manifolds.

T-duality without isometry via extended gauge symmetries of 2D sigma models

Target space duality is one of the most profound properties of string theory. However it customarily requires that the background fields satisfy certain invariance conditions in order to perform it consistently; for instance the vector fields along the directions that T-duality is performed have to generate isometries. In the present paper we examine in detail the possibility to perform T-duality along non-isometric directions. In particular, based on a recent work of Kotov and Strobl, we study gauged 2D sigma models where gauge invariance for an extended set of gauge transformations imposes weaker constraints than in the standard case, notably the corresponding vector fields are not Killing. This formulation enables us to follow a procedure analogous to the derivation of the Buscher rules and obtain two dual models, by integrating out once the Lagrange multipliers and once the gauge fields. We show that this construction indeed works in non-trivial cases by examining an explicit class of examples based on step 2 nilmanifolds.

Accidental SUSY: Enhanced bulk supersymmetry from brane back-reaction

We compute how bulk loops renormalize both bulk and brane effective interactions for codimension-two branes in 6D gauged chiral supergravity, as functions of the brane tension and brane-localized flux. We do so by explicitly integrating out hyper- and gauge-multiplets in 6D gauged chiral supergravity compactified to 4D on a flux-stabilized 2D rugby-ball geometry, specializing the results of a companion paper, arXiv:1210.3753 , to the supersymmetric case. While the brane back-reaction generically breaks supersymmetry, we show that the bulk supersymmetry can be preserved if the amount of brane- localized flux is related in a specific BPS-like way to the brane tension, and verify that the loop corrections to the brane curvature vanish in this special case. In these systems it is the brane-bulk couplings that fix the size of the extra dimensions, and we show that in some circumstances the bulk geometry dynamically adjusts to ensure the supersymmetric BPS-like condition is automatically satisfied. We investigate the robustness of this residual supersymmetry to loops of non-supersymmetric matter on the branes, and show that supersymmetry- breaking effects can enter only through effective brane-bulk interactions involving at least two derivatives. We comment on the relevance of this calculation to proposed applications of codimension-two 6D models to solutions of the hierarchy and cosmological constant problems. © 2013 SISSA.