Bubble instabilities of mIIA on AdS$_4\times S^6$

Abstract

We consider compactifications of massive IIA supergravity on a six-sphere. This setup is known to give rise to non-supersymmetric AdS_44 vacua preserving \mathrm{SO}(7)SO(7) as well as G_22 residual symmetry. Both solutions have a round S^6S6 metric and are supported by the Romans’ mass and internal F_{6}F6 flux. While the \mathrm{SO}(7)SO(7) invariant vacuum is known to be perturbatively unstable, the G_22 invariant one has been found to have a fully stable Kaluza-Klein spectrum. Moreover, it has been shown to be protected against brane-jet instabilities. Motivated by these results, we study possible bubbling solutions connected to the G_22 vacuum, representing non-perturbative instabilities of the latter. We indeed find an instability channel represented by the nucleation of a bubble of nothing dressed up with a homogeneous D2 brane charge distribution in the internal space. Our solution generalizes to the case where S^6S6 is replaced by any six-dimensional nearly-K"ahler manifold.