Polchinski-Strassler does not uplift Klebanov-Strassler

Abstract

Anti-D3-branes at the tip of the Klebanov-Strassler solution with D3-charge dissolved in fluxes give rise, in the probe approximation, to a metastable state. The fully back-reacted smeared solution has singular three-form fluxes in the IR, whose presence suggests a stringy resolution by brane polarization a la Polchinski-Strassler. In this paper we show that there is no polarization into anti-D5-branes wrapping the $S^2$ of the conifold at a finite radius. The singularities therefore do not seem to be physical, signaling that antibranes cannot be used to uplift AdS and obtain a very large landscape of de Sitter vacua in string theory.

30 pages, 2 figures, JHEP style; v2: typos corrected, references added; v3: comments added and sign typo corrected