Musings

Turning on Fluxes and Gauged Supergravity

Previously, I asked whether there was any relation between the de Sitter solutions of compactified string theory with fluxes (and branes) and the explicit gauged supergravity solutions of Trigiante et al.

One good clue about how to go about understanding the connection (if there is one) is the recent paper of Andrianopoli et al. They show explicitly the connection between string compactifications with fluxes and effective gauged supergravity theories.

Perhaps that’s not totally surprising. After all both achieve a reduction in the number of moduli. But, in the former case, I’m used to thinking about this in terms of a flux-induced superpotential. The lifting of the flat directions in gauged supergravity also involves the Higgs mechanism. So the connection between the two approaches is less than obvious (at least to me).

Of course, Andrianopoli et al only discuss abelian gaugings, whereas Trigiante et al need a particular noncompact nonabelian gauging. And, on the string side, Kachru et al have a space-filling anti-D3 brane. So the connection is still a little obscure…