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Abstract:
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In this Ph .D . thesis , we construct and study a number of new type IIB supergravity backgrounds that realize various flavored , finite temperature , and non -supersymmetric deformations of the resolved and deformed conifold geometries . We make heavy use of a U -duality solution generating procedure that allows us to begin with a modification of a family of solutions describing the backreaction of D5 branes wrapped on the S^2 of the resolved conifold , and generate new backgrounds related to the Klebanov -Strassler background .
We first construct finite temperature backgrounds which describe a configuration of N _c D5 branes wrapped on the S^2 of the resolved conifold , in the presence of N _f flavor brane sources and their backreaction i .e . N _f /N _c ~ 1 . In these solutions the dilaton does not blow up at infinity but stabilizes to a finite value . The U -duality procedure is then applied to these solutions to generate new ones with D5 and D3 charge . The resulting backgrounds are a non -extremal deformation of the resolved deformed conifold with D3 and D5 sources . It is tempting to interpret these solutions as gravity duals of finite temperature field theories exhibiting phenomena such as Seiberg dualities , Higgsing and confinement . However , a first necessary step in this direction is to investigate their stability . We study the specific heat of these new flavored backgrounds and find that they are thermodynamically unstable . Our results on the stability also apply to other non -extremal backgrounds with Klebanov -Strassler asymptotics found in the literature .
In the second half of this thesis , we apply the U -duality procedure to generate another class of solutions which are zero temperature , non -supersymmetric deformations of the baryonic branch of Klebanov -Strassler . We interpret these in the dual field theory by the addition of a small gaugino mass . Using a combination of numerical and analytical methods , we construct the backgrounds explicitly , and calculate various observables of the field theory . |