A Cubic Deformation of ABJM: The Squashed, Stretched, Warped, and Perturbed Gets Invaded

Abstract: A superpotential deformation that is cubic in one of the chiral superfields of ABJM makes the latter theory flow into a new, ${\cal N}=2$ superconformal phase. This is holographically dual to a warped $\textrm{AdS}_4 \times_w S^7$ solution of M-theory equipped with a squashed and stretched metric on $S^7$. We determine the spectrum of spin-2 operators of the cubic deformation at low energies by computing the spectrum of Kaluza-Klein (KK) gravitons over the dual AdS$_4$ solution. We calculate, numerically, the complete graviton spectrum and, analytically, the spectrum of gravitons that belong to short multiplets. We also use group theory to assess the structure of the full KK spectrum, and conclude that ${\cal N}=2$ supermultiplets cannot be allocated KK level by KK level. This phenomenon, usually referred to as "space invaders scenario", is also known to occur for another $\textrm{AdS}_4$ solution based on a different squashed $S^7$.