Intersecting branes, Higgs sector, and chirality from $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM with soft SUSY breaking

Understand

We consider $SU(N)$ $\mathcal{N}=4$ super Yang-Mills with cubic and quadratic soft SUSY breaking potential, such that the global $SU(4)_R$ is broken to $SU(3)$ or further.

• As shown recently, this set-up supports a rich set of non-trivial vacua with the geometry of self-intersecting $SU(3)$ branes in 6 extra dimensions.
• The zero modes on these branes can be interpreted as 3 generations of bosonic and chiral fermionic strings connecting the branes at their intersections.
• Here, we uncover a large class of exact solutions consisting of branes connected by Higgs condensates, leading to Yukawa couplings between the chiral fermionic zero modes.