We study how monopole catalysis of baryon decay is realized in holographic QCD. Physics of monopole catalysis becomes much simpler in holographic description as it occurs due to the violation of the Bianchi identity for the 5D gauge symmetry when magnetic monopole is present. In holographic QCD we find a unified picture of the baryon number violation under magnetic monopole or electroweak sphaleron, giving a new mechanism of baryon number violation. We also embed our set-up in the string theory model by Sakai and Sugimoto.
We study the dependence of the chiral condensate on external magnetic field in the context of holographic QCD at large number of flavors. We consider a holographic QCD model where the flavor degrees of freedom fully backreact on the color dynamics. Perturbative QCD calculations have shown that $B$ acts constructively on the chiral condensate, a phenomenon called "magnetic catalysis". In contrast, recent lattice calculations show that, depending on the number of flavors and temperature, the magnetic field may also act destructively, which is called "inverse magnetic catalysis". Here we show tha…
We present a simple model where a nucleon is treated as the Skyrmion, both monopole and Skyrmion are smooth solutions of the classical field equations,the baryon number non-conservation is explicitly built in and is due to the classical analogue of the triangle anomaly, and there is no necessity to consider leptons. We show by numerical analysis that there are no static classical solutions with non-zero baryon number on top of the monopole, i.e., that the monopole catalysis of Skyrmion decay indeed proceeds classically.
We study the effect of magnetic field $B$ on the critical temperature $T_{c}$ of the confinement-deconfinement phase transition in hard-wall AdS/QCD, and holographic duals of flavored and unflavored $\mathcal{N}=4$ super-Yang Mills theories on $\mathbb{R}^3\times \rm S^1$. For all of the holographic models, we find that $T_{c}(B)$ decreases with increasing magnetic field $B\ll T^2$, consistent with the inverse magnetic catalysis recently observed in lattice QCD for $B\lesssim 1~GeV^2$. We also predict that, for large magnetic field $B\gg T^2$, the critical temperature $T_{c}(B)$, eventually, s…
We study the deconfinement phase transition in $ (2+1) $-dimensional holographic $ SU(N) $ gauge theories in the presence of an external magnetic field from the holographic hard and soft wall models. We obtain exact solutions for the critical temperature of the deconfinement transition for any range of magnetic field. As a consequence, we find a critical magnetic field $(B_c)$, in which the critical temperature $(T_c)$ vanishes; for $B<B_c$ we have an inverse magnetic catalysis and for $ B>B_c $ we have a magnetic catalysis.
A new model for monopole catalysis of nucleon decay is proposed. Unlike in the earlier one, the only light fields in this model are the photon and Skyrme (pion) field. The model admits the 't Hooft- Polyakov monopole and Skyrmion as classical solutions, while baryon number non-conservation occurs through an anomaly involving an intermediate mass axial vector field resembling W- and Z-bosons. By considering spherically symmetric monopole-Skyrmion configurations, we find that the Skyrmion looses essentially all its mass when interacting with the monopole, which is phenomenologically identical to…
We study the chiral phase transition in a magnetic field at finite temperature and chemical potential within the Sakai-Sugimoto model, a holographic top-down approach to (large-N_c) QCD. We consider the limit of a small separation of the flavor D8-branes, which corresponds to a dual field theory comparable to a Nambu-Jona Lasinio (NJL) model. Mapping out the surface of the chiral phase transition in the parameter space of magnetic field strength, quark chemical potential, and temperature, we find that for small temperatures the addition of a magnetic field decreases the critical chemical poten…
We review a recent investigation of the effect of magnetic catalysis of mass generation in holographic Yang-Mills theories. We aim at a self-contained and pedagogical form of the review. We provide a brief field theory background and review the basics of holographic flavordynamics. The main part of the review investigates the influence of external magnetic field on holographic gauge theories dual to the D3/D5-- and D3/D7-- brane intersections. Among the observed phenomena are the spontaneous breaking of a global internal symmetry, Zeeman splitting of the energy levels and the existence of pseu…
We explore the effect of the magnetic field on the QCD phase transition through AdS/CFT correspondence. By introducing an anisotropic magnetic field in the Einstein-Maxwell-Scalar system, a family of analytic solutions is obtained by the potential reconstruction method where the contribution of the magnetic field in the blackening background can be analytically derived. After imposing the kinetic gauge function by requesting the linear Regge spectrum of $J/ψ$ mesons, the contribution of the magnetic field phase diagram can be demonstrated. The results show that the transition temperature will …
We investigate the effects of anisotropy on the chiral condensate in a holographic model of QCD with a fully backreacted quark sector at vanishing chemical potential. The high temperature deconfined phase is a neutral and anisotropic plasma showing different pressure gradients along different spatial directions, similar to the state produced in noncentral heavy-ion collisions. We find that the chiral transition occurs at a lower temperature in the presence of anisotropy. Equivalently, we find that anisotropy acts destructively on the chiral condensate near the transition temperature. These are…
It is well known that very large magnetic fields are generated when the Quark-Gluon Plasma is formed during peripheral heavy-ion collisions. Lattice, holographic, and other studies strongly suggest that these fields may, for observationally relevant field values, induce "inverse magnetic catalysis", signalled by a lowering of the critical temperature for the chiral/deconfinement transition. The theoretical basis of this effect has recently attracted much attention; yet so far these investigations have not included another, equally dramatic consequence of the peripheral collision geometry: the …
We investigate the effect of a non-zero magnetic field on the chiral condensate using a holographic QCD approach. We extend the model proposed by Iatrakis, Kiritsis and Paredes in arXiv:1010.1364 that realises chiral symmetry breaking dynamically from 5d tachyon condensation. We calculate the chiral condensate, magnetisation and susceptibilities for the confined and deconfined phases. The model leads, in the probe approximation, to magnetic catalysis of chiral symmetry breaking in both confined and deconfined phases. In the chiral limit, $m_q=0$, we find that in the deconfined phase a sufficie…
We show how to obtain a vanishing DC conductivity in 3-dimensional strongly coupled QFT's using a massive 2-form field in the bulk that satisfies a special kind of boundary condition. The real and imaginary parts of the AC conductivity are evaluated in this holographic setup and we show that the DC conductivity identically vanishes even for an arbitrarily small (though nonzero) value of the 2-form mass in the bulk. We identify the bulk action of the massive 2-form with an effective theory describing a phase in which magnetic monopoles have condensed in the bulk. Our results indicate that a con…
In this paper, we study the influence of an external magnetic field in holographic QCD models where the backreaction is modeled in via an appropriate choice of the background metric. We add a phenomenological soft wall dilaton to incorporate better IR behavior (confinement). Elaborating on previous studies conducted by [JHEP 1505 (2015) 121], we first discuss the Hawking-Page transition, the dual of the deconfinement transition, as a function of the magnetic field. We confirm that the critical deconfinement temperature can drop with the magnetic field. Secondly, we study the quark condensate h…
We investigate the phase diagram of QCD-like gauge theories at strong coupling at finite magnetic field $B$, temperature $T$ and baryon chemical potential $μ$ using the improved holographic QCD model including the full backreaction of the quarks in the plasma. In addition to the phase diagram we study the behavior of the quark condensate as a function of $T$, $B$ and $μ$ and discuss the fate of (inverse) magnetic catalysis at finite $μ$. In particular we observe that inverse magnetic catalysis exists only for small values of the baryon chemical potential. The speed of sound in this holographic…
The strong coupling dynamics of a 2+1 dimensional U(1) gauge theory coupled to charged matter is holographically modeled via a top-down construction with intersecting D3- and D5-branes. We explore the resulting phase diagram at finite temperature and charge density using correlation functions of monopole operators, dual to magnetically charged particles in the higher-dimensional bulk theory, as a diagnostic.
We propose a string dual to the SU(Nc) N=4 SYM coupled to Nf massless fundamental flavors in an external magnetic field. The flavors are introduced by homogeneously smeared Nf D7-branes and the external magnetic field via a non-trivial Kalb-Ramond B-field. Our solution is perturbative in a parameter that counts the number of internal flavor loops. In the limit of vanishing B-field the background reduces to the supersymmetric one obtained in hep-th/0612118. We introduce an additional probe D7--brane and in the supersymmetric limit of vanishing B-field perform a holographic renormalization of it…
We investigate the surface of the chiral phase transition in the three-dimensional parameter space of temperature, baryon chemical potential and magnetic field in two different approaches, the field-theoretical Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model and the holographic Sakai-Sugimoto model. The latter is a top-down approach to a gravity dual of QCD with an asymptotically large number of colors and becomes, in a certain limit, dual to an NJL-like model. Our main observation is that, at nonzero chemical potential, a magnetic field can restore chiral symmetry, in apparent contrast to the phenomenon of ma…
In this letter we clarify that the monopole problem can always be solved in bosonic holographic cosmology, by the analogue of "dilution" in inflation, which is the fact that the {\em electric} current is an irrelevant operator in the dual field theory. We show that not only specific toy models solve the problem, but any purely bosonic member of the phenomenological class, of super-renormalizable, generalized conformal symmetric models.
We study holographic superconductors in the Schwarzschild-AdS black hole with a global monopole through a charged complex scalar field. We calculate the condensates of the charged operators in the dual conformal field theories (CFTs) and discuss the effects of the global monopole on the condensation formation. Moreover, we compute the electric conductive using the probe approximation and find that the properties of the conductive are quite similar to those in the Schwarzschild-AdS black hole. These results can help us know more about holographic superconductors in the asymptotic AdS black hole…
Using two different models from holographic quantum chromodynamics (QCD) we study the deconfinement phase transition in $2+1$ dimensions in the presence of a magnetic field. Working in 2+1 dimensions lead us to {\sl exact} solutions on the magnetic field, in contrast with the case of 3+1 dimensions where the solutions on the magnetic field are perturbative. As our main result we predict a critical magnetic field $B_c$ where the deconfinement critical temperature vanishes. For weak fields meaning $B<B_c$ we find that the critical temperature decreases with increasing magnetic field indicating a…
By employing the holographic operator mixing technique to deal with coupled perturbations in the gauge/gravity duality, I numerically compute the real and imaginary parts of the diagonal and Hall AC conductivities in a strongly coupled quantum field theory dual to a bulk condensate of magnetic monopoles. The results obtained show that a conclusion previously derived in the literature, namely, the vanishing of holographic DC conductivities in 3-dimensional strongly coupled quantum field theories dual to a 4-dimensional bulk magnetic monopole condensate, also applies to the calculation of diagon…
We review the holographic approach to electromagnetic phenomena in large N QCD. After a brief discussion of existing holographic models, we concentrate on the improved holographic QCD model extended to include magnetically induced phenomena. We explore the influence of magnetic fields on the QCD ground state, focusing on (inverse) magnetic catalysis of chiral condensate, investigate the phase diagram of the theory as a function of magnetic field, temperature and quark chemical potential, and, finally discuss effects of magnetic fields on the quark-anti-quark potential, shear viscosity, speed o…
We study the chiral symmetry breaking and restoration in $ (2+1) $-dimensional gauge theories from the holographic hard and softwall models. We describe the behavior of the chiral condensate in the presence of an external magnetic field for both models at finite temperature. For the hardwall model we find Magnetic Catalysis (MC) in different set ups. For the softwall model we find Inverse Magnetic Catalysis (IMC) and MC in different situations. We also find for the softwall model a crossover transition from IMC to MC at a pseudocritical magnetic field. This study also shows spontaneous symmetr…
An analytic static monopole solution is found in global AdS$_4$, in the limit of small backreaction. This solution is mapped in Poincaré patch to a falling monopole configuration, which is dual to a local quench triggered by the injection of a condensate. Choosing boundary conditions which are dual to a time-independent Hamiltonian, we find the same functional form of the energy-momentum tensor as the one of a quench dual to a falling black hole. On the contrary, the details of the spread of entanglement entropy are very different from the falling black hole case where the quench induces alway…
In this work we further extend the investigation of holographic gauge theories in external magnetic fields, continuing earlier work. We study the phenomenon of magnetic catalysis of mass generation in 1+3 and 1+2 dimensions, using D3/D7- and D3/D5-brane systems, respectively. We obtain the low energy effective actions of the corresponding pseudo Goldstone bosons and study their dispersion relations. The D3/D7 system exhibits the usual Gell-Mann--Oakes--Renner (GMOR) relation and a relativistic dispersion relation, while the D3/D5 system exhibits a quadratic non-relativistic dispersion relation…
We show that a hairy black hole solution can provide a holographically dual description of quark confinement. There exists a one-parameter sensible metric which receives the backreaction of matter contents in the holographic action, where the scalar and gauge field are responsible for the condensation of chromomagnetic monopoles. This model features a preconfining phase triggered by second-order monopole condensation and a first-order confinement/deconfinement phase transition. To confirm the confinement, the quark-antiquark potential is calculated by probing a QCD string in both phases. At la…
We consider a holographic description of the chiral symmetry breaking in an external magnetic field in $ (2+1) $-dimensional gauge theories from the softwall model using an improved dilaton field profile given by $Φ(z) = - kz^2 + (k+k_1)z^2\tanh (k_{2}z^2)$. We find inverse magnetic catalysis for $B<B_c$ and magnetic catalysis for $B>B_c$, where $B_c$ is the pseudocritical magnetic field. The transition between these two regimes is a crossover and occurs at $B=B_c$, which depends on the fermion mass and temperature. We also find spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking (the chiral condensate $σ\no…
Using the lattice gauge field theory, we study the relation among the local chiral condensate, monopoles, and color magnetic fields in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). First, we investigate idealized Abelian gauge systems of 1) a static monopole-antimonopole pair and 2) a magnetic flux without monopoles, on a four-dimensional Euclidean lattice. In these systems, we calculate the local chiral condensate on quasi-massless fermions coupled to the Abelian gauge field, and find that the chiral condensate is localized in the vicinity of the magnetic field. Second, using SU(3) lattice QCD Monte Carlo ca…
In this paper, we consider deformed STU model in four dimensions including both electric and magnetic charges. Using AdS/CFT correspondence, we study holographic superconductor and obtain transport properties like electrical and thermal conductivities. We obtain transport properties in terms of the black hole magnetic charge and interpret it as magnetic monopole of dual field theory. We find that presence of magnetic charge is necessary to have maximum conductivities, and existence of magnetic monopole with a critical charge (137 e) to reach the maximum superconductivity is important. Also, we…
We study various aspects of fermions and their chiral condensates, both in the bulk of AdS4 spacetime and in the dual boundary theory. For the most part, we focus on a geometry with an infra-red hard wall. We show that, contrary to common lore, there exist boundary conditions in which the hard wall gives rise to a discrete, but gapless, fermionic spectrum. In such a setting, the presence of a magnetic field induces a bulk fermion condensate which spontaneously breaks CP invariance. We develop the holographic dictionary between composite operators and show that this bulk condensate has the inte…
We study the magnetic catalysis of chiral symmetry breaking in the ABJM Chern-Simons matter theory with unquenched flavors in the Veneziano limit. We consider a magnetized D6-brane probe in the background of a flavored black hole which includes the backreaction of massless smeared flavors in the ABJM geometry. We find a holographic realization for the running of the quark mass due to the dynamical flavors. We compute several thermodynamic quantities of the brane probe and analyze the effects of the dynamical quarks on the fundamental condensate and on the phase diagram of the model. The dynami…
We examine instantons and solitons of the effective action of probe D8-branes in the background of $N_c$ D4-branes which has served as a holographic description of QCD. We show that the 4d instantons sit at the minimum of the Euclidean 5d action. Restricting to the static solitons of the five-dimensional model we are led to consider monopoles in a 3-dimensional curved space. Since the background metric depends only on the fifth coordinate, it is possible to reduce the monopole equations to the ones in flat space and write down the explicit solutions.
We refine an earlier introduced 5-dimensional gravity solution capable of holographically capturing several qualitative aspects of (lattice) QCD in a strong magnetic background such as the anisotropic behaviour of the string tension, inverse catalysis at the level of the deconfinement transition or sensitivity of the entanglement entropy to the latter. Here, we consistently modify our solution of the considered Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton system to not only overcome an unphysical flattening at large distances in the quark-antiquark potential plaguing earlier work, but also to encapsulate inverse …
We study spontaneous chiral-symmetry breaking in SU(3) QCD in terms of the dual superconductor picture for quark confinement in the maximally Abelian (MA) gauge, using lattice QCD Monte Carlo simulations with four different lattices of $16^4$, $24^4$, $24^3\times 6$ at $β=6.0$ (i.e., the spacing $a \simeq$ 0.1 fm), and $32^4$ at $β=6.2$ (i.e., $a \simeq$ 0.075 fm), at the quenched level. First, in the confinement phase, we find Abelian dominance and monopole dominance in the MA gauge for the chiral condensate in the chiral limit,using the two different methods of i) the Banks-Casher relation w…
We describe the simplest example of an instanton bag in Euclidean space. It consists of a monopole wall and a Kaluza-Klein monopole wall, lifted to one higher dimension, trapping the instanton charge in the middle. This object has finite instanton density in a three-dimensional volume. Baryon physics in holographic QCD models gets translated into a multi-instanton problem in the bulk, and a state with a high density baryonic charge consists of a non-diluted multi-instanton solution. The instanton bag is a good candidate for this high-density state. We compute its parameters via moduli stabiliz…
In many-body fermionic systems at finite density correlation functions of the density operator exhibit Friedel oscillations at a wavevector that is twice the Fermi momentum. We demonstrate the existence of such Friedel oscillations in a 3d gravity dual to a compressible finite-density state in a (1+1) dimensional field theory. The bulk dynamics is provided by a Maxwell U(1) gauge theory and all the charge is behind a bulk horizon. The bulk gauge theory is compact and so there exist magnetic monopole tunneling events. We compute the effect of these monopoles on holographic density-density corre…
We present a holographic theory in AdS_4 whose zero temperature ground state develops a crystal structure, spontaneously breaking translational symmetry. The crystal is induced by a background magnetic field, but requires no chemical potential. This lattice arises from the existence of 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole solitons in the bulk which condense to form a classical object known as a monopole wall. In the infra-red, the magnetic field is screened and there is an emergent SU(2) global symmetry.
We continue the study of a recently constructed holographic QCD model supplemented with magnetic field. We consider the holographic dual of a quark, anti-quark pair and investigate its entropy beyond the deconfinement phase transition in terms of interquark distance, temperature and magnetic field. We obtain a clear magnetic field dependence in the strongly decreasing entropy near deconfinement and in the entropy variation for growing interquark separation. We uncover various supporting evidences for inverse magnetic catalysis. The emergent entropic force is found to become stronger with magne…
We study the influence of a background magnetic field on the $J/ψ$ vector meson in a DBI-extension of the soft wall model, building upon our earlier work Phys. Rev. D91, 086002 (2015). In this specific holographic QCD model, we discuss the heavy quark number susceptibility and diffusion constants of charm quarks and their dependence on the magnetic field by either a hydrodynamic expansion or by numerically solving the differential equation. This allows us to determine the response of these transport coefficients to the magnetic field. The effects of the latter are considered both from a direct…
We discuss the phenomenon of (inverse) magnetic catalysis for both the deconfinement and chiral transition. We discriminate between the hard and soft wall model, which we suitably generalize to include a magnetic field. Our findings show a critical deconfinement temperature going down, in contrast with the chiral restoration temperature growing with increasing magnetic field. This is at odds with contemporary lattice data, so the quest for a holographic QCD model capable of capturing inverse magnetic catalysis in the chiral sector remains open.
We study the rho meson in a uniform magnetic field eB using a holographic QCD-model, more specifically a D4/D8/Dbar8 brane setup in the confinement phase at zero temperature with two quenched flavours. The parameters of the model are fixed by matching to corresponding dual field theory parameters at zero magnetic field. We show that the up- and down-flavour branes respond differently to the presence of the magnetic field in the dual QCD-like theory, as expected because of the different electromagnetic charge carried by up- and down-quark. We discuss how to recover the Landau levels, indicating…
We study the rho meson mass in a uniform background magnetic field eB at zero temperature, in search of indications for the magnetically induced rho meson condensation, as predicted recently by Chernodub. The holographic model used is the Sakai-Sugimoto model with two flavours and a non-zero constituent quark mass. We fix the free holographic parameters by matching them to the phenomenological value for the constituent quark mass and the experimental values for the pion decay constant and the rho meson mass, this in absence of a magnetic field. In a first approximation, the Landau levels are r…
We study two aspects of 3D QCD with massless fermions in a holographic set-up from string theory, based on D3/D7 branes; parity anomaly and baryons as baby Skyrmions. We first give a novel account of parity anomaly of 3D QCD with odd number of flavors from the IR holographic viewpoint by observing a subtle point in D7 brane embeddings with a given fixed UV theory. We also discuss its UV origin in terms of weakly coupled D-brane pictures. We then focus on the parity-symmetric case of even number of N_F flavors, and study baryons in the holographic model. We identify the monopoles of U(N_F) gaug…
Applications to holographic theories have led to some recent interest in magnetic monopoles in four-dimensional Anti-de Sitter spacetime. This paper is concerned with a study of these monopoles, using both analytic and numerical methods. An approximation is introduced in which the fields of a charge N monopole are explicitly given in terms of a degree N rational map. Within this approximation, it is shown that the minimal energy monopole of charge N has the same symmetry as the minimal energy Skyrmion with baryon number N in Minkowski spacetime. Beyond charge two the minimal energy monopole ha…
Using the gauge-gravity duality we study strongly coupled dynamics of fundamental flavours in large N_c gauge theories in a constant external field. We primarily focus on the effects of an external magnetic field. We use two holographic models realized in the Type IIB and Type IIA supergravity and present a comparative case study. In both these models, by studying the dynamics of probe branes, we explicitly demonstrate and discuss the magnetically induced chiral symmetry breaking effect ("magnetic catalysis") in the flavour sector. We also study the associated thermodynamics and the meson spec…
