Holonomy from wrapped branes

Abstract

Compactifications of M-theory on manifolds with reduced holonomy arise as the local 11-dimensional description of D6-branes wrapped on supersymmetric cycles in manifolds of lower dimension with a different holonomy group. Whenever the isometry group SU(2) is present, eight-dimensional gauged supergravity is a natural arena for such investigations. In this paper, we use this approach and review the 11-dimensional description of D6-branes wrapped on coassociative 4-cycles, on deformed 3-cycles inside Calabi–Yau threefolds and on Kähler 4-cycles.