The dynamics of a probe D7-brane in an asymptotically AdS-Vaidya background has been investigated in the presence of an external magnetic field. Holographically, this is dual to the dynamical meson melting in the N = 2 super Yang-Milles theory. If the final temperature of the system is large enough, the probe D7-brane will dynamically cross the horizon (black hole embedding). By turning on the external magnetic field and raising it sufficiently, the final embedding of the corresponding D7-brane changes to Minkowski embedding. In the field theory side, this means that the mesons which melt due to the raise in the temperature, will form bound states again by applying an external magnetic field. We will also show that the evolution of the system to its final equilibrium state is postponed due to the presence of the magnetic field.
We consider a heavy quark-antiquark $(q\bar{q})$ pair as a heavy meson in the medium composed of light quarks and gluons. By using the AdS/CFT correspondence, the properties of this system are investigated. In particular, we study the inter-quark distance and it is shown that the mechanism of melting in the quark-gluon plasma and in the hadronic phase are the same. It is found that by considering finite coupling corrections, the inter-quark distance of a heavy meson decreases. As a result a heavy meson like $J/ ψ$ will melt at higher temperatures. By considering rotating heavy mesons, we discu…
A holographic model for QCD is employed to investigate the effects of the gluon condensate on the spectrum and melting of scalar mesons. We find the evolution of the free energy density with the temperature, and the result shows that the temperature of the confinement/deconfinement transition is sensitive to the gluon-condensate parameter. The spectral functions (SPFs) are also obtained and show a series of peaks in the low-temperature regime, indicating the presence of quasiparticle states associated to the mesons, while the number of peaks decreases with the increment of the temperature, cha…
A holographic model of probe vector mesons (quarkonia) is presented, where the dynamical gravity-dilaton background is adjusted to the thermodynamics of 2 +1 flavor QCD with physical quark masses. The vector meson action is modified to account for various quark masses. We focus on the $Φ$, $J/ψ$ and $Υ$ meson melting in agreement with hadron phenomenology in heavy-ion collisions at LHC, that is the formation of hadrons at the observed freeze-out temperature of 155 MeV.
In the present letter we use holographic methods to show that a very intense magnetic field lowers the temperature at which the mesons melt and decreases the mass gap of the spectrum along with their masses. Consequently, there is a range of temperatures for which mesons can be melted by applying a magnetic field instead of increasing the temperature. We term this effect Magnetic Meson Melting (MMM), and we are able to observe it by constructing a configuration that makes it possible to apply gauge/gravity methods to study fundamental degrees of freedom in a quark-gluon plasma subject to a mag…
The plasma phase at high temperatures of a strongly coupled gauge theory can be holographically modelled by an AdS black hole. Matter in the fundamental representation and in the quenched approximation is introduced through embedding D7-branes in the AdS-Schwarzschild background. Low spin mesons correspond to the fluctuations of the D7-brane world volume. As is well known by now, there are two different kinds of embeddings, either reaching down to the black hole horizon or staying outside of it. In the latter case the fluctuations of the D7-brane world volume represent stable low spin mesons. …
We consider an analysis of potentials related to Schrödinger-type equations for scalar fields in a 5D AdS black hole background with dilaton in order to get melting temperatures for different hadrons in a thermal bath. The approach does not consider calculations of spectral functions and it is easy to get results for hadrons with an arbitrary number of constituents. We present results for scalar mesons, glueballs, hybrid mesons and tetraquarks, and we show that mesons are more resistant to being melted in a thermal bath than other scalar hadrons, and in general the melting temperature increase…
We analyse mesons at finite temperature in a chiral, confining string dual. The temperature dependence of low-spin as well as high-spin meson masses is shown to exhibit a pattern familiar from the lattice. Furthermore, we find the dissociation temperature of mesons as a function of their spin, showing that at a fixed quark mass, mesons with larger spins dissociate at lower temperatures. The Goldstone bosons associated with chiral symmetry breaking are shown to disappear above the chiral symmetry restoration temperature. Finally, we show that holographic consideration imply that large-spin meso…
The fraction of heavy vector mesons produced in a heavy ion collision, as compared to a proton proton collision, serves as an important indication of the formation of a thermal medium, the quark gluon plasma. This sort of analysis strongly depends on understanding the thermal effects of a medium like the plasma on the states of heavy mesons. In particular, it is crucial to know the temperature ranges where they undergo a thermal dissociation, or melting. AdS/QCD models are know to provide an important tool for the calculation of hadronic masses, but in general are not consistent with the obser…
We use gauge/gravity duality to investigate the effect of thermal fluctuations on the dissociation of the quarkonium meson in strongly coupled $(3+1)$-dimensional gauge theories. This is done by studying the instability and probable first order phase transition of a probe D7-brane in the dual gravity theory. We explicitly show that for the Minkowski embeddings with their tips close to the horizon in the background, the long wavelength thermal fluctuations lead to an imaginary term in their action signaling an instability in the system. Due to this instability, a phase transition is expected. O…
We discuss mesons in thermalizing gluon backgrounds in the N=2 supersymmetric QCD using the gravity dual. We numerically compute the dynamics of a probe D7-brane in the Vaidya-AdS geometry that corresponds to a D3-brane background thermalizing from zero to finite temperatures by energy injection. In static backgrounds, it has been known that there are two kinds of brane embeddings where the brane intersects the black hole or not. They correspond to the phases with melted or stable mesons. In our dynamical setup, we obtain three cases depending on final temperatures and injection time scales. T…
We extend our analysis of holographic meson dissociation in the presence of an intense magnetic field. In addition to the previously known critical temperature above which the mesons melt, we found that for certain magnetic field intensities there exists a second lower critical temperature, below which stable mesons cease to exist. While we showed before that there is a range of high temperatures for which mesons can be melted by changing the magnetic field intensity, here we show that, as a consequence of the second critical point, there is also a range of low temperatures for which this phen…
In this work, we investigate the melting of charmonium states within a holographic QCD model in the context of Einstein-Maxwell-Dilaton (EMD) theory. In the dual field theory, the model describes the heavy mesons inside a finite temperature and density medium. First, we calculate the spectrum at zero temperature. Then, at finite temperature, we obtain the spectral functions, where the heavy vector meson are represented by peaks. We show that the charmonium melts down at temperatures above the confinement/deconfinement temperature of the quark-gluon plasma. We also observe that the chemical pot…
We study the influence of a background magnetic field on the melting of the J/psi vector meson by introducing a Born-Infeld modification of the soft-wall model. Out of the three polarizations of the massive vector meson, we find that the longitudinal one (parallel to the applied magnetic field) melts only at an even higher temperature than the deconfinement temperature, whereas the two transverse polarizations melt at a lower temperature than in the absence of a magnetic field. We also conduct a preliminary investigation of the effect of the magnetic field on the heavy quark diffusion coeffici…
We use a ten dimensional dual string background to aspects of the physics large N four dimensional SU(N) gauge theory, where its fundamental quarks are charged under a background electric field. The theory is N=2 supersymmetric for vanishing temperature and electric field. At zero temperature, we observe that the electric field induces a phase transition associated with the dissociation of the mesons into their constituent quarks. This is an analogue of an insulator-metal transition, since the system goes from being an insulator with zero current (in the applied field) to a conductor with free…
At a meson melting transition in holographic QCD, a weak turbulence of mesons was found with critical embeddings of probe D-branes in gravity duals. The turbulent mesons have a power-law energy distribution $\varepsilon_n \propto (ω_n)^α$ where $ω_n$ is the mass of the $n$-th excited resonance of the meson tower. In this paper, we find that the turbulence power $α$ is universal, irrespective of how the transition is driven, by numerically calculating the power in various static brane setups at criticality. We also find that the power $α$ depends only on the cone dimensions of the probe D-brane…
This is a review of the authors' recent results on an integrable structure of the melting crystal model with external potentials. The partition function of this model is a sum over all plane partitions (3D Young diagrams). By the method of transfer matrices, this sum turns into a sum over ordinary partitions (Young diagrams), which may be thought of as a model of q -deformed random partitions. This model can be further translated to the language of a complex fermion system. A fermionic realization of the quantum torus Lie algebra is shown to underlie therein. With the aid of hidden symmetry of…
The holographic dual of a finite-temperature gauge theory with a small number of flavours typically contains D-brane probes in a black hole background. We have recently shown that these systems undergo a first order phase transition characterised by a `melting' of the mesons. Here we extend our analysis of the thermodynamics of these systems by computing their free energy, entropy and energy densities, as well as the speed of sound. We also compute the meson spectrum for brane embeddings outside the horizon and find that tachyonic modes appear where this phase is expected to be unstable from t…
We study the response of confining gauge theory to the external electric field by using holographic Yang-Mills theories in the large $N_c$ limit. Although the theories are in the confinement phase, we find a transition from the insulator to the conductor phase when the electric field exceeds its critical value. Then, the baryon number current is generated in the conductor phase. At the same time, in this phase, the meson melting is observed through the quasi-normal modes of meson spectrum. Possible ideas are given for the string state corresponding to the melted mesons, and they lead to the id…
This thesis is dedicated to the holographic study of flavor dynamics. The technique employed is a D7-brane probing of various D3-brane backgrounds. The first topic covered studies the influence of an external magnetic field on a flavored large N Yang-Mills theory. The theory exhibits spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. The meson spectrum exhibits Zeeman splitting and characteristic GMOR relation. The second topic examines thermal properties of the dual gauge theory. The third topic studies the phase structure of the finite temperature dual gauge theory in the presence of magnetic field. A ph…
We continue our study of the dynamics of the flavour sector of the Sakai-Sugimoto model in the presence of an external magnetic field, uncovering several features of the meson spectrum at high and low temperatures. We employ both analytical and numerical methods to study the coupled non-linear equations that result from the gravity dual.
In the AdS/CFT framework meson thermalization in the presence of a constant external magnetic field in a strongly coupled gauge theory has been studied. In the gravitational description the thermalization of mesons corresponds to the horizon formation on the flavour D7-brane which is embedded in the AdS_5 x S^5 background in the probe limit. The apparent horizon forms due to the time-dependent change in the baryon number chemical potential, the injection of baryons in the gauge theory. We will numerically show that the thermalization happens even faster in the presence of the magnetic field on…
We present a continuum formulation for $θ$-vacua in the massive Schwinger model on the light-front, where $θ$ enters as a background electric field. The effective coupling of the external field is partially screened due to vacuum polarization processes. For small fermion masses and small $θ$ we calculate the mass of the meson and find agreement with results from bosonization.
Using a ten dimensional dual string background, we study aspects of the physics of finite temperature large N four dimensional SU(N) gauge theory, focusing on the dynamics of fundamental quarks in the presence of a background magnetic field. At vanishing temperature and magnetic field, the theory has N=2 supersymmetry, and the quarks are in hypermultiplet representations. In a previous study, similar techniques were used to show that the quark dynamics exhibit spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. In the present work we begin by establishing the non-trivial phase structure that results from fi…
In this paper, we consider a rotating heavy quark-antiquark ($q\bar{q}$) pair in a ${\mathcal{N}}$=4 SYM thermal plasma. We assume that $q\bar{q}$ center of mass moves at the speed $v$ and furthermore they rotate around the center of mass. We use the AdS/CFT correspondence and consider the effect of external electromagnetic field on the motion of the rotating meson. Then we calculate the jet-quenching parameter corresponding to the rotating meson in the constant electric field.
The inverse time ordered Green's function is defined in a covariant three-dimensional formalism using the diagram approach.The equation of motion of a two-quark composite system in an external electromagnetic field up to the second order in the field strength is obtained. The polarizability of the $π$-meson is calculated using this formalism. The mean square radius of the two-quark system is calculated from the wave functions of the system. In addition, radiative corrections are calculated for both the polarizability and the mean square radius.
We consider a D7-brane probe of $AdS_{5}\times S^5$ in the presence of pure gauge $B$-field. The dual gauge theory is flavored Yang-Mills theory in external magnetic field. We explore the dependence of the fermionic condensate on the bare quark mass $m_{q}$ and study the discrete self-similar behavior of the theory near the origin of the parametric space. We calculate the critical exponents of the bare quark mass and the fermionic condensate. A study of the meson spectrum supports the expectation based on thermodynamic considerations that at zero bare quark mass the stable phase of the theory …
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…
The holographic dual of large-Nc super-Yang-Mills coupled to a small number of flavours of fundamental matter, Nf << Nc, is described by Nf probe D7-branes in the gravitational background of Nc black D3-branes. This system undergoes a first order phase transition characterised by the `melting' of the mesons. We study the high temperature phase in which the D7-branes extend through the black hole horizon. In this phase, we compute the spectral function for vector, scalar and pseudoscalar modes on the D7-brane probe. We also compute the diffusion constant for the flavour currents.
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 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…
In this work we study the spatial-momentum dependence of mesonic spectral functions obtained from the quark-meson model using a recently proposed method to calculate real-time observables at finite temperature and density from the Functional Renormalization Group. This non-perturbative method is thermodynamically consistent, symmetry-preserving and based on an analytic continuation from imaginary to real time on the level of the flow equations for 2-point functions. Results on the spatial-momentum dependence of the pion and sigma spectral function are presented at different temperatures and de…
We study the equilibrium instability of chiral quarkonia in a plasma in the presence of constant magnetic and electric field and at finite axial chemical potential using AdS/CFT duality. The model in use is a supersymmetric QCD at large 't$\,$Hooft coupling and number of colors. We show that the presence of the magnetic field and the axial chemical potential even in the absence of the electric field make the system unstable. In a gapped system, a stable/unstable equilibrium state phase transition is observed and the initial transition amplitude of the equilibrium state to the non-equilibrium s…
We inspect the mass spectrum of heavy-light mesons in deformed N=2 super Yang-Mills theory using the AdS/CFT correspondence. We demonstrate how some of the degeneracies of the supersymmetric meson spectrum can be removed upon breaking the supersymmetry, thus leading to the emergence of hyperfine structure. The explicit SUSY breaking scenarios we consider involve on one hand tilting one of the two fundamental D7 branes inside the internal R^6 space, and on the other hand applying an external magnetic field on the (untilted) branes. The latter scenario leads to the well-known Zeeman effect, whic…
The low-energy chiral effective field theory of vector mesons and Goldstone bosons in external gravitational field is considered. The energy-momentum tensor is obtained and the gravitational form factors of the $ρ$-meson are calculated up to next-to-leading order in the chiral expansion. This amounts to considering tree-level and one-loop order diagrams. The chiral expansion of the form factors at zero momentum transfer as well as of the slope parameters is worked out. Also, the long-range behaviour of the energy and internal force distributions is obtained and analysed.
