A Cornucopia of AdS$_5$ Vacua

Abstract

We report on a systematic search for AdS$_5$ vacua corresponding to critical points of the potential in the five-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=8$ SO(6) gauged supergravity. By employing Google's TensorFlow Machine Learning library, we find the total of 32 critical points including 5 previously known ones. All 27 new critical points are non-supersymmetric. We compute the mass spectra of scalar fluctuatons for all points and find that the non-supersymmetric AdS$_5$ vacua are perturbatively unstable. Many of the new critical points can be found analytically within consistent truncations of the $\mathcal{N}=8$ supergravity with respect to discrete subgroups of the S(O(6)$\times$ GL(2,$\mathbb{R}$)) symmetry of the potential. In particular, we discuss in detail a $\mathbb{Z}_2^3$-invariant truncation with 10 scalar fields and 15 critical points. We also compute explicitly the scalar potential in a $\mathbb{Z}_2^2$-invariant extension of that truncation to 18 scalar fields and reproduce 17 of the 32 critical points from the numerical search. Finally, we show that the full potential as a function of 42 scalar fields can be studied analytically using the so-called solvable parametrization. In particular, we find that all critical points lie in a $\mathbb{Z}_2$-invariant subspace spanned by 22 scalar fields.