Exotic polarizations of D2 branes and oblique vacua of (2+1)-dimensional super Yang-Mills theory - art. no. 126007

We investigate the oblique vacua in the perturbed (2 + 1)-dimensional gauge theory living on D2-branes. The string theory dual of these vacua is expec ted to correspond to polarizations of the D2-branes into NS5-branes with D4 -brane charge. We perturb the gauge theory by adding fermion masses. In the nonsupersymmetric case, we also consider the effect of slight variations o f the masses of the scalars. For certain ranges of scalar masses we find ob lique vacua. We show that D4 charge is an essential ingredient in understan ding D2 --> NS5 polarizations. We find that some of the polarization states which appear as metastable vacua when the D4 charge is not considered an i n fact unstable. They decay by acquiring a D4 charge, tilting and shrinking to zero size.