The many faces of brane-flux annihilation

Fluxes can decay via the nucleation of Brown-Teitelboim bubbles, but when the decaying fluxes induce D-brane charges this process must be accompanied with an annihilation of D-branes. This occurs via dynamics inside the bubble wall as was well described for (D3)-bar branes annihilating against 3-form fluxes. In this paper we extend this to the other (Dp)-bar branes with p smaller than seven. Generically there are two decay channels: one for the RR flux and one for the NSNS flux. The RR channel is accompanied by brane annihilation that can be understood from the (Dp)-bar branes polarising into D(p+2) branes, whereas the NSNS channel corresponds to (Dp)-bar branes polarising into NS5 branes or KK5 branes. We illustrate this with the decay of antibranes probing local toroidal throat geometries obtained from T-duality of the D6 solution in massive type IIA. We show that (Dp)-bar branes are metastable against annihilation in these backgrounds, at least at the probe level.