Geometric metastability, quivers and holography

We use large N duality to study brane/antibrane configurations on a class of Calabi-Yau manifolds. With only branes present, the Calabi-Yau manifolds in question give rise to N = 2 ADE quiver theories deformed by superpotential terms. We show that the large N duality conjecture of [M. Aganagic, C. Beem, J. Seo, C. Vafa, Geometrically induced metastability and holography, hep-th/0610249] reproduces correctly the known qualitative features of the brane/antibrane physics. In the supersymmetric case, the gauge theories have Seiberg dualities, which are represented as flops in the geometry. Moreover, the holographic dual geometry encodes the whole RG flow of the gauge theory. In the non-supersymmetric case, the large N duality predicts that the brane/antibrane theories also enjoy such dualities, and, allows one to pick out the good description at a given energy scale. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.