Geometrically induced metastability and holography

We construct metastable configurations of branes and anti-branes wrapping 2-spheres inside local Calabi-Yau manifolds and study their large N duals. These duals are Calabi-Yau manifolds in which the wrapped 2-spheres have been replaced by 3-spheres with flux through them, and supersymmetry is spontaneously broken. The geometry of the non-supersymmetric vacuum is exactly calculable to all orders of the 't Hooft parameter, and to the leading order in I IN. The computation utilizes the same matrix model techniques that were used in the supersymmetric context. This provides a novel mechanism for breaking supersymmetry in the context of flux compactifications. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.