Metastable vacua and the backreacted Stenzel geometry

We construct an M-theory background dual to the metastable state recently discussed by Klebanov and Pufu, which corresponds to placing a stack of anti-M2 branes at the tip of a warped Stenzel space. With this purpose we analytically solve for the linearized non-supersymmetric deformations around the warped Stenzel space, preserving the SO(5) symmetries of the supersymmetric background, and which interpolate between the IR and UV region. We identify the supergravity solution which corresponds to a stack of N̄ backreacting anti-M2 branes by fixing all the 12 integration constants in terms of N̄. While in the UV this solution has the desired features to describe the conjectured metastable state of the dual (2+1)-dimensional theory, in the IR it suffers from a singularity in the four-form ux, which we describe in some details. © SISSA 2012.