Supersymmetric Moduli Space and Vacua with Vector Fields in $D=4$ Gauged $\mathcal{N}=8$ Supergravity

Abstract

When fermions are taken to be anti-periodic along a spacelike $S^1$ in $AdS_4$, certain ground states of the supergravity theory are described by AdS-soliton-like spacetimes. We study these geometries within the purely dilatonic STU model obtained from the compactification of M-theory on $S^7$ in the presence of non-trivial gauge fields. The resulting configurations define a rich family of everywhere regular supersymmetric vacua that holographically describe strongly coupled ``confining'' gauge theories in three dimensions. We provide a complete characterization of the moduli space of supersymmetric solutions in terms of the vacuum expectation values of the dimension-one operators of the truncation.