We analyze excited baryon states using a holographic dual of QCD that is defined on the basis of an intersecting D4/D8-brane system. Studies of baryons in this model have been made by regarding them as a topological soliton of a gauge theory on a five-dimensional curved spacetime. However, this allows one to obtain only a certain class of baryons. We attempt to present a framework such that a whole set of excited baryons can be treated in a systematic way. This is achieved by employing the original idea of Witten, which states that a baryon is described by a system composed of $N_c$ open strings emanating from a baryon vertex. We argue that this system can be formulated by an ADHM-type matrix model of Hashimoto-Iizuka-Yi together with an infinite tower of the open string massive modes. Using this setup, we work out the spectra of excited baryons and compare them with the experimental data. In particular, we derive a formula of the nucleon Regge trajectory assuming that the excited nucleons lying the trajectory are characterized by the excitation of a single open string attached on the baryon vertex.
We model the soft pomeron in QCD using a scalar Polyakov string with extrinsic curvature in the bottom-up approach of holographic QCD. The overall dipole-dipole scattering amplitude in the soft pomeron kinematics is shown to be sensitive to the extrinsic curvature of the string for finite momentum transfer. The characteristics of the diffractive peak in the differential elastic $pp$ scattering are affected by a small extrinsic curvature of the string.
We consider the finite temperature phase diagram of holographic QCD in the Veneziano limit (Nc large, Nf large with xf=Nf/Nc fixed) and calculate one string-loop corrections to the free energy in certain approximations. Such corrections, especially due to the pion modes are unsuppressed in the Veneziano limit. We find that under some extra assumptions the first order transition following from classical gravity solutions can become second order. If stringy asymptotics are of a special form and there are residual interactions it may even become of third order. Operationally these computations im…
Holography inspired stringy hadrons (HISH) is a set of models that describe hadrons: mesons, baryons and glueballs as strings in four dimensional space time. The models are based on a "map" from stringy hadrons of holographic confining backgrounds. In this note we review the "derivation" of the models. We start with a brief reminder of the passage from the AdS5xS5 string theory to certain flavored confining holographic models. We then describe the string configurations in holographic backgrounds that correspond to a Wilson line,a meson,a baryon and a glueball. The key ingredients of the four d…
Using SU(3) quenched lattice QCD, we study ground-state and low-lying even-parity excited-state potentials of quark-antiquark systems in terms of the gluon-momentum component in the Coulomb gauge. By introducing UV-cut in the gluon-momentum space, we investigate the "UV-gluon sensitivity" of the ground-state and excited-state potentials and the stringy excitation quantitatively. Even after cutting off high-momentum gluon component above 1.5GeV, the IR part of the ground-state potential is almost unchanged. On the other hand, the change of excited-state potential is more significant by the cut …
Based on the holographic conjecture for superstrings on Dp-brane backgrounds and the dual (p+1)-dimensional gauge theory ($0\le p\le 4$) given in hep-th/0308024 and hep-th/0405203, we continue the study of superstring amplitudes including string higher modes ($n\ne 0$). We give a prediction to the two-point functions of operators with large R-charge J. The effect of stringy modes do not appear as the form of anomalous dimensions except for p=3. Instead, it gives non-trivial correction to the two-point functions for supergravity modes. For p=4, the scalar two-point functions for any n behave li…
In both cases of quark-antiquark (Q-Qbar) and three-quark (3Q) systems, we study ground-state and low-lying excited-state potentials in terms of the gluon-momentum component in the Coulomb gauge in SU(3) quenched lattice QCD. By introducing UV-cut in the gluon-momentum space, we investigate the "UV-gluon sensitivity" of the ground-state and excited-state potentials quantitatively. Such a non-quark-origin excitation is a purely gluonic excitation, which can be interpreted as a stringy excitation in the color flux-tube picture of hadrons. For both Q-Qbar and 3Q systems, the IR part of the ground…
Holographic AdS/QCD models of the Pomeron unite a string-based description of hadronic reactions of the pre-QCD era with the perturbative BFKL approach. The specific version we will use due to Stoffers and Zahed, is based on a semiclassical quantization of a "tube" (closed string exchange or open string virtual pair production) in its Euclidean formulation using the scalar Polyakov action. This model has a number of phenomenologically successful results. The periodicity of a coordinate around the tube allows the introduction of a Matsubara time and therefore an effective temperature Teff on th…
In this note we collect and summarize the predictions of the Holography Inspired Stringy Hadron (HISH) model. We list the masses and widths of predicted excited states across the spectrum, based on placing the different hadrons on the non-linear Regge trajectories of a string with massive endpoints. Our predicted states include: (i) Light, heavy-light and heavy-heavy mesons. (ii) Baryons, including charmed, doubly charmed and bottom baryons. (iii) Glueballs, together with a method to disentangle them from flavorless mesons. (iv) Genuine tetraquarks, which are not "molecules" of hadrons, and ar…
In dipole-dipole scattering at large rapidity χ={\rm ln}(s/s_0), the induced instanton on the string worldsheet carries entropy S_k=2(α_{Pk}-1)χwith α_{Pk}-1 the pomeron intercept for a dipole source of N-ality k. This stringy entropy is neither coherent nor thermal. We argue that it is released promptly over a time t_R\approx (b / χ)^3 / (4 α') with α'/2 the pomeron slope and b the impact parameter. This stringy entropy may explain the 3/2 jump in the total charged multiplicities at about 10 participants reported over a wide range of collider energies by PHOBOS. We predict the charged multipl…
Modeling QCD at large temperature with a simple holographic five dimensional theory encoding minimal breaking of conformality, allows for the calculation of all the transport coefficients, up to second order, in terms of a single parameter. In particular, the shear and bulk relaxation times are provided. The result follows by deforming the AdS background with a scalar dual to a marginally relevant operator, at leading order in the deformation parameter.
There has been considerable recent interest in holographic complexity. The two leading conjectures on this subject hold that the quantum complexity of the boundary thermofield double state should be dual to either the volume of the Einstein-Rosen bridge connecting the two sides (CV conjecture) or to the action of the Wheeler-de-Witt patch of the bulk spacetime (CA conjecture). Although these conjectures are frequently studied in the context of pure Einstein gravity, from the perspective of string theory it is also natural to consider models of gravity in which general relativity is perturbed b…
We consider an exactly solvable worldsheet string theory in the background of a black brane with a gauge field flux. Holographically, such a system can be interpreted as a field theory with finite number of degrees of freedom at finite temperature and density. This is to be contrasted with more conventional holographic models which involve gravity in the bulk and possess infinite number of degrees of freedom and mean field critical exponents. We construct closed string vertex operators which holographically represent the U(1) gauge field and the stress energy tensor and compute their two-point…
We show that the null Melvin map applied to a rotational isometry of global anti-de Sitter space produces a spacetime with properties analogous to both the Godel and Schrodinger geometries. The isometry group of this Godel-Schrodinger spacetime is appropriate to provide a holographic dual for the same non-relativistic conformal theory as the ordinary Schrodinger geometry, but defined on a sphere. This spacetime also possesses closed timelike curves outside a certain critical radius. We show that a holographic preferred screen for an observer at the origin sits at an interior radius, suggesting…
The purpose of this review is to provide basic ingredients of holographic QCD to non-experts in string theory and to summarize its interesting achievements in nuclear and hadron physics. We focus on results from a less stringy bottom-up approach and review a stringy top-down model with some calculational details.
Pole-skipping is a recently discovered signature of many-body quantum chaos in collective energy dynamics. It establishes a precise connection between resummed, all-order hydrodynamics and the underlying microscopic chaos. In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of pole-skipping in holographic conformal field theories with higher-derivative gravity duals. In particular, we first consider Einstein-Hilbert gravity deformed by curvature-squared ($R^2$) corrections and then type IIB supergravity theory with the $α'^3 R^4$ term, where $α'$ is set by the length of the fundamental string. The for…
We suggest to use the state $Y(4630)$, which decays predominantly to $Λ_c\barΛ_c$, as a window to the landscape of tetraquarks. We propose a simple criterion to decide whether a state is a genuine stringy exotic hadron - a tetraquark - or a "molecule". If it is the former it should be on a (modified) Regge trajectory. We present the predictions of the mass and width of the higher excited states on the $Y(4630)$ trajectory. We argue that there should exist an analogous "$Y_b$" state that decays to $Λ_b\barΛ_b$ and describe its trajectory. We conjecture also a similar trajectory for tetraquarks …
We present a no-go theorem that it is impossible in general to construct a holographic description of each meson with the quark-antiquark valence degree of freedom only with fixed (conserved) quantum number L in 3+1 dimensions and that would satisfy at the same time manifest chiral symmetry in the ultraviolet and would not violate unitarity.
The non-perturbative dynamics of quantum field theories is studied using theoretical tools inspired by string formalism. Two main lines are developed: the analysis of stringy instantons in a class of four-dimensional N=2 gauge theories and the holographic study of the minimal model for a strongly coupled unbalanced superconductor. The field theory instanton calculus admits a natural and efficient description in terms of D-brane models. In addition, the string viewpoint offers the possibility of generalizing the ordinary instanton configurations. Even though such generalized, or stringy, instan…
We present evidence for the target space duality symmetry associated with massive excited states of closed bosonic string. The evolution of string is considered in ${\hat D}$ spacetime dimensions; out of which d spacial dimensions are compactified on torus. The phase space Hamiltonian formulation is adopted to unveil the T-duality symmetry from the worldsheet perspective. The existence of this symmetry is verified for a few massive levels. A systematic procedure is presented to study T-duality symmetry of vertex operators for all massive levels of closed bosonic string. It is argued that all v…
We consider a new approach towards constructing approximate holographic duals of QCD from experimental hadron properties. This framework allows us to derive a gravity dual which reproduces the empirically found linear square-mass trajectories of universal slope for radially and orbitally excited hadrons. Conformal symmetry breaking in the bulk is exclusively due to infrared deformations of the anti-de Sitter metric and governed by one free mass scale proportional to Lambda_QCD. The resulting background geometry exhibits dual signatures of confinement and provides the first examples of holograp…
In the type IIB maximally supersymmetric pp-wave background, stringy excited modes are described by BMN (Berenstein-Madalcena-Nastase) operators in the dual $\mathcal{N}=4$ super-Yang-Mills theory. In this paper, we continue the studies of higher genus free BMN correlators with more stringy modes, mostly focusing on the case of genus one and four stringy modes in different transverse directions. Surprisingly, we find that the non negativity of torus two-point functions, which is a consequence of a previously proposed probability interpretation and has been verified in the cases with two and th…
We propose a new holographic C-function for the accelerating universe defined in the stringy frame motivated mainly by the fact that the number of degrees of freedom should be infinite for a physical system of infinite size. This is the generalization of Strominger's recent proposal of the holographic C-function to the asymptotically non-de Sitter universe. We find that the corresponding C-theorem holds true if the universe accelerates toward the weak coupling regime driven by the exponential dilaton potential. It also holds in other simple cases.
Within the framework of AdS/QCD models, the spectra of radially excited hadrons are identified with towers of Kaluza-Klein (KK) states in a putative dual theory. The infinite number of KK states is indispensable to provide correct high energy asymptotics of correlation functions in QCD. It is known, however, that the KK modes of dual theory must be qualitatively different from real hadrons. And what is more important, the radially excited states appear in lattice calculations not as "excitations" of some ground state, but rather as independent states coupled to higher dimensional QCD operators…
We investigate the leptonic decay constants of the pion and its excitations with a 5-d holographic model for quantum chromodynamics. We prove numerically that the leptonic decay constants of the excited states of the pion vanish in the chiral limit when chiral symmetry is dynamically broken. This nontrivial result is in agreement with a solid prediction of quantum chromodynamics and is based on a generalized Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relationship involving the decay constants and masses of the excited states of the pion. We also obtain an extended partially conserved axial-vector current relation…
In this paper, we generalize the study of the model of holographic superconductor in the excited states to the framework of massive gravity. By taking into account the effect of massive graviton, we numerically present a family of solutions of the holographic superconductor in excited states, and find that the critical temperatures can be higher due to the effect of massive graviton comparing with the superconductor in Einstein gravity. We also investigate the condensates and conductivities in the ground state and the excited states with studying various parameters that determine the framework…
Within the bottom-up holographic approach to QCD, the highly excited hadrons are identified with the bulk normal modes in the fifth "holographic" dimension. We show that additional states in the same mass range can appear also from taking into consideration the 5D fields dual to higher dimensional QCD operators. The possible effects of these operators were not taken into account in almost all phenomenological applications. Using the scalar case as the simplest example, we demonstrate that the additional higher dimensional operators lead to a large degeneracy of highly excited states in the Sof…
We propose a real time holographic framework to study thermalization processes of a family of QFT excited states. The construction builds on Skenderis-van Rees's holographic duals to QFT Schwinger-Keldysh complex-time ordered paths. Thermalization is explored choosing a set of observables $F_n$ which essentially isolate the excited state contribution. Focusing on theories defined on compact manifolds and with excited states defined in terms of Euclidean path integrals, we identify boundary conditions that allow to avoid any number of modes in the initial field state. In the large conformal dim…
We show that in string theory, due to non-perturbative effects, there are cases in which two states that semi-classically are completely different, are in fact the same. One state cannot be excited without exciting the other; they are two components of the same state in the exact theory. As a result, in some situations that include black holes, the nature of information in string theory is dramatically different than in field theory. In particular, each general-relativity state, that lives in the atmosphere of black fivebranes, is accompanied with an excitation that lives on folded strings, wh…
Based on the Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue problem, we develop a general analytic technique to investigate the excited states of the holographic superconductors. By including more higher order terms in the expansion of the trial function, we observe that the analytic results agree well with the numeric data, which indicates that the Sturm-Liouville method is very powerful to study the holographic superconductors even if we consider the excited states. For both the holographic s-wave and p-wave models, we find that the excited state has a lower critical temperature than the corresponding ground st…
In this paper, we study the entanglement contour in a general excited state in the holographic 2d CFT using the partial entanglement entropy proposal. We show how thermodynamics fixes the entanglement contour relating it to the first law of entanglement. We derive the entanglement contour for a general time-dependent excited state and consider a quenched initial state in the presence of spatial boundaries as an explicit example. Finally, we comment on the coarse-graining and the complexity contour in the $AdS_3/CFT_2$.
In this paper we investigate the model of the anti-de Sitter gravity coupled to a Maxwell field and a free, complex scalar field, and construct a fully back-reacted holographic model of superconductor with excited states. With the fixed charge $q$, there exist a series of excited states of holographic superconductor with the corresponding critical chemical potentials. The condensates as functions of the temperature for the two operators $\mathcal{O}_1$ and $\mathcal{O}_2$ of excited states are also studied. For the optical conductivity in the excited states, we find that there exist the additi…
We study the holographic duality between boundary OPE blocks and geodesic integrated bulk fields in quotients of AdS$_3$ dual to excited CFT states. The quotient geometries exhibit non-minimal geodesics between pairs of spacelike separated boundary points which modify the OPE block duality. We decompose OPE blocks into quotient invariant operators and propose a duality with bulk fields integrated over individual geodesics, minimal or non-minimal. We provide evidence for this relationship by studying the monodromy of asymptotic maps that implement the quotients.
We study how the microstates of BPS sectors in string theory are organized in the dual $U(N)$ gauge theory. The microstates take the form of a coherent sum of stacks of branes and their open/closed string excitations. We propose a prescription to holographically construct the indices of string/brane configurations by analyzing the modifications of determinant operators in gauge theory. The string/brane configurations should be interpreted in the tensionless limit, but their indices are well-defined at finite $N$. In various examples, we provide evidence that a sum, of the giant graviton-type r…
We use holographic methods to study the entanglement entropy for excited states in a two dimensional conformal field theory. The entangling area is a single interval and the excitations are produced by in and out vertex operators with given scaling dimensions. On the gravity side we provide the excitations by turning on a scalar field with an appropriate mass. The calculation amounts to using the gravitational background, with a singular boundary, to find the one point function of the vertex operators. The singular boundary is taken care of by introducing a nontrivial UV regulator surface to c…
We study the dynamics of the holographic $s$-wave superconductors described by the Einstein-Maxwell-complex scalar field theory with a negative cosmological constant. If the eigenfunction of the linearized equation of motion of the scalar field in the planar RNAdS black hole background is chosen as the initial data, the bulk system will evolve to the intermediate state that corresponds to the excited state superconductor on the boundary. The process can be regarded as the non-equilibrium condensation process of the excited state of holographic superconductor. When the linear superposition of t…
We employ the numerical and analytical methods to study the effects of the hyperscaling violation on the ground and excited states of holographic superconductors for $d=2,~z=2$. For both the holographic s-wave and p-wave models with the hyperscaling violation, we observe that the excited state has a lower critical temperature than the corresponding ground state, which is similar to the relativistic case, and the difference of the dimensionless critical chemical potential between the consecutive states decreases as the hyperscaling violation increases. Interestingly, as we amplify the hyperscal…
We consider aspects of the role of stringy scales and Hagedorn temperatures in the correspondence between various field theories and AdS-type spaces. The boundary theory is set on a toroidal world-volume to enable small scales to appear in the supergravity backgrounds also for low field-theory temperatures. We find that thermodynamical considerations tend to favour background manifolds with no string-size characteristic scales. The gravitational dynamics censors the reliable exposure of Hagedorn physics on the supergravity side, and the system does not allow the study of the Hagedorn scale by …
We discuss a particular stringy modular cosmology with two axion fields in seven space-time dimensions, decomposable as a time and two flat three-spaces. The effective equations of motion for the problem are those of the $SU(3)$ Toda molecule, and hence are integrable. We write down the solutions, and show that all of them are singular. They can be thought of as a generalization of the Pre-Big-Bang cosmology with excited internal degrees of freedom, and still suffering from the graceful exit problem. Some of the solutions however show a rather unexpected property: some of their spatial section…
In this paper we re-investigate the model of the anti-de Sitter gravity coupled to Maxwell and charged scalar fields, which has been studied as the gravitational dual to a superconductor for a long time since the famous work [Phys.\ Rev.\ Lett.\ {\bf 101}, 031601 (2008)]. By numerical method, we present a novel family of solutions of holographical superconductor with excited states, and find there exists a lower critical temperature in the corresponding excited state. Moreover, we study the condensate and conductivity in the excited states. It is very interesting that the conductivity $σ$ of e…
We propose a new matrix model describing multi-baryon systems. We derive the action from open string theory on the wrapped baryon vertex D-branes embedded in the D4-D8 model of large N holographic QCD. The positions of k baryons are unified into k x k matrices, with spin/isospin of the baryons encoded in a set of k-vectors. Holographic baryons are known to be very small in the large 't Hooft coupling limit, and our model offers a better systematic approach to dynamics of such baryons at short distances. We compute energetics and spectra (k=1), and also short-distance nuclear force (k=2). In pa…
In this work we study the Tomita-Takesaki construction for a family of excited states that, in a strongly coupled CFT - at large $N$-, correspond to coherent states in an asymptotically AdS spacetime geometry. We compute the modular flow and modular Hamiltonian associated to these excited states in the Rindler wedge and for a ball shaped entangling surface. Using holography, one can compute the bulk modular flow and construct the Tomita-Takesaki theory for these cases. We also discuss generalizations of the entanglement regions in the bulk and how to estimate the modular Hamiltonian in a large…
We construct a family of solutions of the holographic insulator/superconductor phase transitions with the excited states in the AdS soliton background by using both the numerical and analytical methods. The interesting point is that the improved Sturm-Liouville method can not only analytically investigate the properties of the phase transition with the excited states, but also the distributions of the condensed fields in the vicinity of the critical point. We observe that, regardless of the type of the holographic model, the excited state has a higher critical chemical potential than the corre…
We present a systematic construction of bulk solutions that are dual to CFT excited states. The bulk solution is constructed perturbatively in bulk fields. The linearised solution is universal and depends only on the conformal dimension of the primary operator that is associated with the state via the operator-state correspondence, while higher order terms depend on detailed properties of the operator, such as its OPE with itself and generally involve many bulk fields. We illustrate the discussion with the holographic construction of the universal part of the solution for states of two dimensi…
In this work we revisit the problem of contributions of excited holographic states to the entanglement entropy in two-dimensional conformal field theories. Using the results of replica trick method we find three expressions for these contributions. First, we express the contribution of the excited states in terms of Aharonov invariants. It is shown that beside the Schwarzian, the one-point functions of descendants of energy-momentum also contribute. Given Schwarz-Christoffel map, the contributions to any order can be easily computed. The second expression relates the entanglement entropy of ex…
We revisit HHH model in [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 101}, 031601 (2008)] and extend the ansatz of matter fields to being of depending on a spatial dimension except the holographic direction. Despite homogeneous solutions of ground and excited states, especially for the excited states, there also exists solutions where the translational invariance is broken. It is worth mentioning that no periodic sources are assigned to the matter fields, so the translational symmetry is broken spontaneously. We investigate how the new solutions and the condensates of excited states develop with the change of tempe…
In this Letter, we bring together two topics in the holographic correspondence - quantum chaos and quark-gluon plasma (QGP). We establish that the first relativistic correction to drag force experienced by a charge carrier moving through a thermal medium (for example, a quark in QGP) at a constant velocity is fixed by the butterfly velocity. Moreover, we show that this result is robust against stringy corrections and anisotropy. For the jet quenching parameter, we find that it is related to the butterfly velocity along the momentum broadening direction and temperature in the spirit of the ``Pl…
We study baryons of arbitrary isospin in a stringy holographic QCD model. In this D4-D8 holographic setting, the flavor symmetry is promoted to a gauge symmetry in the bulk, and produces, as KK modes of the gauge field, pions and spin one mesons of low energy QCD. Baryons of arbitrary isospins are represented as instanton solitons with isospin and spin quantum numbers locked, in a manner similar to the Skyrmion model. The soliton picture leads to a natural effective field theory of arbitrary baryons interacting with mesons. Couplings of baryons to axial mesons, including pions, are dominated i…
String theory on AdS3 backgrounds arises as an IR limit of Little String Theory on NS5-branes. A wide variety of holographic RG flows from the fivebrane theory in the UV to (orbifolds of) AdS3 in the IR is amenable to exact treatment in worldsheet string theory as a class of null-gauged WZW models. The condensate of stringy winding operators which resolves the near-source structure of fivebranes on the Coulomb branch plays a crucial role in AdS3, revealing stringy structure invisible to the supergravity approximation. The D-brane sector contains precursors of the long strings which dominate bl…
We study a d-dimensional FRW universe, containing a perfect fluid with p = w ρand \frac{1} {d - 1} \le w \le 1, and find a correspondence principle similar to that of Horowitz and Polchinski in the black hole case. This principle follows quite generally from thermodynamics and the conservation of energy momentum tensor, and can be stated along similar lines as in the black hole case: ``When the temperature T of the universe becomes of order string scale the universe state becomes a highly excited string state. At the transition, the entropies and energies of the universe and strings differ by …
We revisit the cubic interaction of IIB string theory in the maximally supersymmetric pp-wave background. In the supergravity limit, we show that detailed comparison with AdS supergravity determine the vertex completely. Extension of this supergravity vertex to the full string theory leads to a new cubic vertex that combines the previous proposals and contains additional terms. We give an alternative derivation of the holographic duality map in supergravity, first found by Dobashi and Yoneya (hep-th/0406225) and show that our new vertex is consistent with it. We compare some non-BPS amplitudes…
The Skenderis-van Rees prescription, which allows the calculation of time-ordered correlation functions of local operators in CFT's using holographic methods is studied and applied for excited states. Calculation of correlators and matrix elements of local CFT operators between generic in/out states are carried out in global Lorentzian AdS. We find the precise form of such states, obtain an holographic formula to compute the inner product between them, and using the consistency with other known prescriptions, we argue that the in/out excited states built according to the Skenderis-Van Rees pre…
We evaluate the entanglement wedge cross section (EWCS) in asymptotically AdS geometries which are dual to boundary excited states. We carry out a perturbative analysis for calculating EWCS between the vacuum and other states for a symmetric configuration consisting of two disjoint strips and obtain analytical results in the specific regimes of the parameter space. In particular, when the states described by purely gravitational excitations in the bulk we find that the leading correction to EWCS is negative and hence the correlation between the boundary subregions decreases. We also study othe…
