We study topological objects in holographic QCD based on the Sakai-Sugimoto model, which is constructed with $N_c$ D4 branes and $N_f$ D8/$\bar{\rm D8}$ branes in the superstring theory, and is infrared equivalent to 1+3 dimensional massless QCD. Using the gauge/gravity duality, holographic QCD is described as 1+4 dimensional U($N_f$) gauge theory in flavor space with a background gravity, and its instanton solutions correspond to baryons. First, using the Witten Ansatz, we reduce holographic QCD into a 1+2 dimensional Abelian Higgs theory in a curved space and consider its topological aspect. We numerically obtain the Abrikosov vortex solution and investigate single baryon properties. Second, we study a single meron and two merons in holographic QCD. The single meron carrying a half-integer baryon number is found to have a infinite energy also in holographic QCD. We propose a new-type baryon excitation of the two-merons oscillation in the extra-direction of holographic QCD.
The aim of these lectures is to convey a working knowledge of Light Front Holographic QCD and Supersymmetric Light Front Holographic QCD. We first give an overview of holographic QCD in general and then concentrate on the application of the holographic methods on QCD quantized in the light front form. We show how the implementation of the supersymmetric algebra fixes the interaction and how one can obtain hadron mass spectra with the minimal number of parameters. We also treat propagators and compare the holographic approach with other non-perturbative methods. In the last chapter we describe …
We study the H-dibaryon (uuddss) in holographic QCD for the first time. Holographic QCD is derived from a QCD-equivalent D-brane system ($S^1$-compactified D4/D8/$\overline{\rm D8}$) in the superstring theory via the gauge/gravity correspondence. In holographic QCD, all baryons appear as topological chiral solitons of Nambu-Goldstone bosons and (axial) vector mesons. In this framework, the H-dibaryon can be described as an SO(3)-type hedgehog state. We present the formalism of the H-dibaryon in holographic QCD, and perform the calculation to investigate its properties in the chiral limit.
We consider the Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton system with an arbitrary kinetic gauge function and a dilaton potential. A family of analytic solutions is obtained by the potential reconstruction method. We then study its holographic dual QCD model. The kinetic gauge function can be fixed by requesting the linear Regge spectrum of mesons. We calculate the free energy to obtain the phase diagram of the holographic QCD model.
We discuss a derivation of the quadratic in fields part of action of bottom-up holographic models from some general properties of the large-Nc limit in QCD.
Recent progress in constructing holographic models for QCD is discussed, concentrating on the bottom-up models which implement holographically the renormalization group flow of QCD. The dynamics of gluons can be modeled by using a string-inspired model termed improved holographic QCD, and flavor can be added by introducing space filling branes in this model. The flavor fully backreacts to the glue in the Veneziano limit, giving rise to a class of models which are called V-QCD. The phase diagrams and spectra of V-QCD are in good agreement with results for QCD obtained by other methods.
Properties of the tensor glueball are discussed in the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto Model, a top-down holographic approach to the non-perturbative region of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD).
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…
At the dawn of a new theoretical tool based on the AdS/CFT correspondence for nonperturbative aspects of quantum chromodynamics, we give an interim review on the new tool, holographic QCD, with some of its accomplishment. We try to give an A-to-Z picture of the holographic QCD, from string theory to a few selected top-down holographic QCD models with one or two physical applications in each model. We may not attempt to collect diverse results from various holographic QCD model studies.
Recently certain nonlocal operators were proposed to provide quark masses for the holographic model of QCD developed by Sakai and Sugimoto. The properties of these operators at strong coupling are examined in detail using holographic techniques. We find the renormalization procedure for these operators is modified by the running of the five-dimensional gauge coupling. We explicitly evaluate the chiral condensate characterized by these operators.
The H-dibaryon (uuddss) is studied in holographic QCD for the first time. In holographic QCD, four-dimensional QCD, i.e., SU($N_c$) gauge theory with chiral quarks, can be formulated with $S^1$-compactified D4/D8/$\overline{\rm D8}$-brane system. In holographic QCD with large $N_c$, all the baryons appear as topological chiral solitons of Nambu-Goldstone bosons and (axial) vector mesons, and the H-dibaryon can be described as an SO(3)-type topological soliton with $B=2$. We derive the low-energy effective theory to describe the H-dibaryon in holographic QCD. The H-dibaryon mass is found to be …
We consider a holographic model of QCD, obtained by a very simple modification of the original construction, which describes at the same time the pion mass, the QCD anomalies and the baryons as topological solitons. We study in detail its phenomenological implications in both the mesonic and baryonic sectors and compare with the observations.
We consider the Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton system with an arbitrary kinetic gauge function and a dilaton potential. A family of analytic solutions is obtained by the potential reconstruction method. We then study its holographic dual QCD model. The kinetic gauge function can be fixed by requesting the linear Regge spectrum of mesons. We calculate the free energy to obtain the phase diagram of the holographic QCD model and interpret our result as the heavy quarks system by comparing the recent lattice QCD simulation. We finally obtain the equations of state in our model.
We review construction of the improved holographic models for QCD-like confining gauge theories and their applications to the physics of the Quark-gluon plasma. We also review recent progress in this area of research. The lecture notes start from the vacuum structure of these theories, then develop thermodynamic and hydrodynamic observables and end with more advanced topics such as the holographic QCD in the presence of external magnetic fields. This is a summary of the lectures presented at the 56th Cracow School of Theoretical Physics in Spring 2016 at Zakopane, Poland.
We consider configurations of D4-D8-\bar D8 branes which correspond to large N QCD with non-vanishing temperature and chemical potential for baryon number and isospin. We study the holographic dual of this model and find a rich phase structure. The phases, distinguished by the values of quark condensates, are separated by the surfaces of first order phase transitions. The picture is in many respects similar to the expected phase structure of QCD in the chiral limit.
Based on the expectation that constituent quark model may capture right physics in the large N limit, we point out that orbital angular momentum of the quark-antiquark pair inside light mesons of low spins in the constituent quark model may provide a clue for the holographic dual string model of large N QCD. Our discussion, relying on a few suggestive assumptions, leads to a necessity of world-sheet fermions in the bulk of dual strings that can incorporate intrinsic spins of fundamental QCD degrees of freedom. We also comment on an interesting issue of the size of mesons in the context of holo…
Some problems with theoretical foundations of bottom-up holographic models are briefly discussed. It is pointed out that the spectroscopic aspects of these models in principle do not require the AdS/CFT prescriptions and may be interpreted as just an alternative language expressing the phenomenology of QCD sum rules in the large-Nc limit. A general recipe for incorporation of the chiral symmetry breaking scale into the soft-wall holographic models is proposed.
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 find a one to one mapping between low energy string dilaton states in AdS bulk and high energy glueball states on the corresponding boundary. This holographic mapping leads to a relation between bulk and boundary scattering amplitudes. From this relation and the dilaton action we find the appropriate momentum scaling for high energy QCD amplitudes at fixed angles.
We further analyze the holographic dipole-dipole scattering amplitude developed in arXiv:1202.0831, 1205.3223. Gribov diffusion at strong coupling yields the scattering amplitude in a confining background. We compare the holographic result for the differential cross section to proton-proton and deeply virtual Compton scattering data.
V-QCD is a class of effective holographic models for QCD which fully includes the backreaction of quarks to gluon dynamics. The physics of the theta-angle and the axial anomaly can be consistently included in these models. We analyze their phase diagrams over ranges of values of the quark mass, N_f/N_c, and theta, computing observables such as the topological susceptibility and the meson masses. At small quark mass, where effective chiral Lagrangians are reliable, they agree with the predictions of V-QCD.
A holographic model of probe quarkonia is presented, where the dynamical gravity-dilaton background is adjusted to the thermodynamics of 2 +1 flavor QCD with physical quark masses. The quarkonia action is modified to account for a systematic study of the heavy-quark mass dependence. We focus on the $J/ψ$ and $Υ$ spectral functions and relate our model to heavy quarkonia formation as a special aspect of hadron phenomenology in heavy-ion collisions at LHC.
We review the recent progress made in using holographic QCD to study hadronic contributions to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, in particular the hadronic light-by-light scattering contribution, where the short-distance constraints associated with the axial anomaly are notoriously difficult to satisfy in hadronic models. This requires the summation of an infinite tower of axial vector mesons, which is naturally present in holographic QCD models, and indeed takes care of the longitudinal short-distance constraint due to Melnikov and Vainshtein. Numerically the results of simple hard-w…
The response function of a homogeneous and dense hadronic system to a time-dependent (baryon) vector potential is discussed for holographic dense QCD (D4/D8 embedding) both in the confined and deconfined phases. Confined holographic QCD is an uncompressible and static baryonic insulator at large N_c and large λ, with a gapped vector spectrum and a massless pion. Deconfined holographic QCD is a diffusive conductor with restored chiral symmetry and a gapped transverse baryonic current. Similarly, dense D3/D7 is diffusive for any non-zero temperature at large N_c and large λ. At zero temperature …
Bottom-up holographic models of QCD, inspired by the AdS/CFT correspondence, have shown a remarkable degree of phenomenological success. However, they rely on a number of bold assumptions. We investigate the reliability of one of the key assumptions, which involves matching the parameters of these models to QCD at high 4D momentum $q^2$ and renormalization scale $μ^2$. We show that this leads to phenomenological and theoretical inconsistencies for scale-dependent quantities such as $\bra \bar{q}q\ket$
Holography provides a powerful tool to model QCD and other strongly coupled gauge dynamics. As examples of its power to compute in novel environments I review some recent results: these include models of the phase structure of QCD at finite temperature and chemical potential; and computation of time dependent processes at strongly coupled phase transitions.
We propose several quark mass deformations of the holographic model of massless QCD using the D4/D8/D8bar brane configuration proposed by Sakai and Sugimoto. The deformations are based on introducing additional D4 or D6 branes away from the QCD D4 branes. The idea is similar to extended technicolor theories, where the chiral symmetry breaking by additional D-branes are mediated to QCD to induce non-zero quark masses. In the D-brane picture as well as the holographic dual gravity description, the quark and the pion masses are generated by novel worldsheet instantons with finite area. We also de…
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.
We develop a dynamical holographic QCD model, which resembles the renormalization group from ultraviolet (UV) to infrared (IR). The dynamical holographic model is constructed in the graviton-dilaton-scalar framework with the dilaton background field $Φ$ and scalar field $X$ responsible for the gluodynamics and chiral dynamics, respectively. We summarize our results on hadron spectra, QCD phase transition and transport properties including the jet quenching parameter and the shear/bulk viscosity in the framework of the dynamical holographic QCD model.
Solving the properties of dense QCD matter is an extremely challenging problem because standard theoretical tools do not work at intermediate densities. The gauge/gravity duality may help to provide answers in this region. I give a brief review of recent progress in this field, focusing on the V-QCD model, which is one of the most sophisticated holographic models of QCD. I discuss predictions for the phase diagram, the equation of state, and properties of baryons. I apply these results to analyze the properties of neutron stars and to quark matter production in neutron star mergers.
The AdS/QCD models are known to be tightly related with the QCD sum rules in the large-Nc (called also planar) limit. Rewriting the theory of infinite tower of free stable mesons expected in the large-Nc QCD as a five-dimensional theory we scrutinize to what extend the bottom-up holographic models may be viewed as an alternative language expressing the phenomenology of planar QCD sum rules. It is found that many features of AdS/QCD models can be thereby obtained without invoking prescriptions from the original AdS/CFT correspondence. Under some assumptions, all possibilities leading to simple …
We study pion condensation at zero temperature in a hard-wall holographic model of hadrons with isospin chemical potential. We find that the transition from the hadronic phase to the pion condensate phase is first order except in a certain limit of model parameters. Our analysis suggests that immediately across the phase boundary the condensate acts as a stiff medium approaching the Zel'dovich limit of equal energy density and pressure.
We apply the relation between deep learning (DL) and the AdS/CFT correspondence to a holographic model of QCD. Using a lattice QCD data of the chiral condensate at a finite temperature as our training data, the deep learning procedure holographically determines an emergent bulk metric as neural network weights. The emergent bulk metric is found to have both a black hole horizon and a finite-height IR wall, so shares both the confining and deconfining phases, signaling the cross-over thermal phase transition of QCD. In fact, a quark antiquark potential holographically calculated by the emergent…
In a hard-wall model of holographic QCD, we find that nonlinear boundary dynamics are required in order to maintain the correct pattern of explicit and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking beyond leading order in the pion fields. With the help of a field redefinition, we relate the requisite nonlinear boundary conditions to a standard Sturm-Liouville system. Observables insensitive to the chiral limit receive only small corrections in the improved description, and classical calculations in the hard-wall model remain surprisingly accurate.
We introduce the strange quark mass to the Sakai-Sugimoto model of holographic QCD. We compute mass shifts in the spectra of three-flavor baryons at the leading order in perturbation in quark masses. Comparison with experimental data shows an agreement only qualitatively.
A self-consistent holographic QCD model is proposed which can realize both chiral symmetry breaking and confinement, two most important phenomena of QCD. It is pointed out that the model can accommodate both Regge spectra of hadrons and the linear potential between quarks. The model is formulated in the framework of graviton-dilaton-scalar system, where the dilaton field is dual to the dimension-2 gluon condensate and can lead to the linear confinement, while the scalar field corresponds to the quark anti-quark condensate and can explain the property of chiral dynamics.
We review 5D holographic approaches to finite temperature QCD. Thermodynamic properties of the "hard-wall" and the "soft-wall" models are derived. Various non-realistic features in these models are cured by the set-up of improved holographic QCD, that we review here.
We study confinement-deconfinement phase transition in a holographic soft-wall QCD model. By solving the Einstein-Maxwell-scalar system analytically, we obtain the phase structure of the black hole backgrounds. We then impose probe open strings in such background to investigate the confinement-deconfinement phase transition from different open string configurations under various temperatures and chemical potentials. Furthermore, we study the Wilson loop by calculating the minimal surface of the probing open string world-sheet and obtain the Cornell potential in confinement phase analytically.
The soft wall model in holographic QCD has Regge trajectories but wrong operator product expansion (OPE) for the two-point vectorial QCD Green function. We modify the dilaton potential to comply OPE. We study also the axial two-point function using the same modified dilaton field and an additional scalar field to address chiral symmetry breaking. OPE is recovered adding a boundary term and low energy chiral parameters, $F_π$ and $L_{10}$, are well described analytically by the model in terms of Regge spacing and QCD condensates. The model nicely supports and extends previous theoretical analys…
We show that holographic models of QCD predict the presence of a Chern-Simons coupling between vector and axial-vector mesons at finite baryon density. In the AdS/CFT dictionary, the coefficient of this coupling is proportional to the baryon number density, and is fixed uniquely in the five-dimensional holographic dual by anomalies in the flavor currents. For the lightest mesons, the coupling mixes transverse $ρ$ and $a_1$ polarization states. At sufficiently large baryon number densities, it produces an instability, which causes the $ρ$ and $a_1$ mesons to condense in a state breaking both ro…
We calculate the ${α'}^4$ corrections to the non-Abelian DBI action on the D8-brane in the holographic dual of large N_c QCD proposed by Sakai and Sugimoto. These give rise to higher derivative terms, in particular, four derivative contact terms for the pion field with the coupling uniquely determined. We calculate the pion-pion scattering amplitude near threshold. The results respecting unitarity are in qualitative agreement with the experimental curves.
We present our current progress in the holographic computation of the scattering amplitude for Deeply Virtual Compton Scattering (DVCS) processe, as a function of the Mandelstam invariant $t$. We show that it is possible to describe simultaneously the differential cross-section and total cross-section of DVCS data with a single holographic model for the pomeron. Using data from H1-ZEUS we obtained a $χ^2_{dof} \sim 1.5$ for the best fit to the data.
We propose a simple prescription for including low-energy weak-interactions into the framework of holographic QCD, based on the standard AdS/CFT dictionary of double-trace deformations. As our proposal enables us to calculate various electro-weak observables involving strongly coupled QCD, it opens a new perspective on phenomenological applications of holographic QCD. We illustrate efficiency and usefulness of our method by performing a few exemplar calculations; neutron beta decay, charged pion weak decay, and meson-nucleon parity non-conserving (PNC) couplings. The idea is general enough to …
We calculate the holographic entanglement entropy for the holographic QCD phase diagram considered in [Knaute, Yaresko, Kämpfer (2017), arXiv:1702.06731] and explore the resulting qualitative behavior over the temperature-chemical potential plane. In agreement with the thermodynamic result, the phase diagram exhibits the same critical point as the onset of a first-order phase transition curve. We compare the phase diagram of the entanglement entropy to that of the thermodynamic entropy density and find a striking agreement in the vicinity of the critical point. Thus, the holographic entangleme…
Starting from the Hamiltonian equation of motion in QCD we find a single variable light-front equation for QCD which determines the eigenspectrum and the light-front wavefunctions of hadrons for general spin and orbital angular momentum. This light-front wave equation is equivalent to the equations of motion which describe the propagation of spin-$J$ modes on anti-de Sitter (AdS) space.
We study baryons in holographic QCD with $D4/D8/\bar{D8}$ multi $D$ brane system. In holographic QCD, the baryon appears as a topologically non-trivial chiral soliton in a four-dimensional effective theory of mesons, which is called `Brane-induced Skyrmion'. We derive and calculate the Euler-Lagrange equation for the hedgehog configuration with chiral profile $F(r)$ and $ρ$-meson profile $\tilde G(r)$, and obtain the soliton solution of the holographic QCD.
We compute the spectrum of light hadrons in a holographic dual of QCD defined on $AdS_5 \times S^5$ which has conformal behavior at short distances and confinement at large interquark separation. Specific hadrons are identified by the correspondence of string modes with the dimension of the interpolating operator of the hadron's valence Fock state. Higher orbital excitations are matched quanta to quanta with fluctuations about the AdS background. Since only one parameter, the QCD scale $Λ_{QCD}$, is used, the agreement with the pattern of physical states is remarkable. In particular, the ratio…
We introduce the 5-dimension dynamical holographic QCD model, which is constructed in the graviton-dilaton-scalar framework with the dilaton background field $Φ$ and the scalar field $X$ responsible for the gluodynamics and chiral dynamics, respectively. We review our results on the hadron spectra including the glueball and light meson spectra, QCD phase transitions and transport properties in the framework of the dynamical holographic QCD model.
A surprisingly good holographic description of QCD can be obtained from naive five dimensional gauge theory on a truncated AdS space. We seek to improve the infra-red description of QCD in such models by using a more sophisticated metric and an action derived from string theory duals of chiral symmetry breaking. Our metric is smooth into the infra-red and the chiral condensate is a prediction of the dynamics. The theory reproduces QCD meson data at the 10% level.
The chiral symmetry breaking ($χ_{SB}$) is one of the most fundamental problems in QCD. In this paper, we calculate quark condensation analytically in a holographic QCD model dual to the Einstein-Maxwell-Dilaton (EMD) system coupled to a probe scalar field. We find that the black hole phase transition in the EMD system seriously affects $χ_{SB}$. At small chemical potential, $χ_{SB}$ behaves as a crossover. For large chemical potential $μ>μ_c$, $χ_{SB}$ becomes first order with exactly the same transition temperature as the black hole phase transition by a bypass mechanism. The phase diagram w…
We study the nuclear symmetry energy of dense matter using holographic QCD. To this end, we consider two flavor branes with equal quark masses in a D4/D6/D6 model. We find that at all densities the symmetry energy monotonically increases. At small densities, it exhibits a power law behavior with the density, $E_{\rm sym} \sim ρ^{1/2}$.
To realize massive pions, we study variations of the holographic model of massless QCD using the D4/D8/anti-D8 brane configuration proposed by Sakai and Sugimoto. We propose deformations which break the chiral symmetry explicitly and compute the mass of the pions and vector mesons. The observed value of the pion mass can be obtained. We also argue a chiral perturbation corresponding to our deformation.
We derive an explicit form of the dilaton potential in improved holographic QCD (IHQCD) from the experimental data of the $ρ$ meson spectrum. For this purpose we make use of the emergent bulk geometry obtained by deep learning from the hadronic data in arXiv:2005.02636. Requiring that the geometry is a solution of an IHQCD derives the corresponding dilaton potential backwards. This determines the bulk action in a data-driven way, which enables us at the same time to ensure that the deep learning proposal is a consistent gravity. Furthermore, we find that the resulting potential satisfies the r…
We study baryons and baryonic matter in holographic QCD with $D4/D8/\bar{D8}$ multi-$D$ brane system. In large-$N_c$ holographic QCD, the baryon appears as a topologically non-trivial chiral soliton, which is called ``brane-induced Skyrmion''. We also analyze the features of the baryonic matter in holographic QCD by investigating the system of single brane-induced Skyrmion on a three-dimensional closed manifold $S^3$. We propose a new interesting picture of ``pion dominance'' near the critical density.
Using holographic QCD based on D4-branes and D8-anti-D8-branes, we have computed couplings of glueballs to light mesons. We describe glueball decay by explicitly calculating its decay widths and branching ratios. Interestingly, while glueballs remain less well understood both theoretically and experimentally, our results are found to be consistent with the experimental data for the scalar glueball candidate f_0(1500). More generally, holographic QCD predicts that decay of any glueball to 4 $π_0$ is surpressed, and that mixing of the lightest glueball with $q\bar{q}$ mesons is small.
In the framework of a holographic QCD approach we study an influence of matters on the deconfinement temperature, $T_c$. We first consider quark flavor number ($N_f$) dependence of $T_c$. We observe that $T_c$ decreases with $N_f$, which is consistent with a lattice QCD result. We also delve into how the quark number density $ρ_q$ affects the value of $T_c$. We find that $T_c$ drops with increasing $ρ_q$. In both cases, we confirm that the contributions from quarks are suppressed by $1/N_c$, as it should be, compared to the ones from a gravitational action (pure Yang-Mills).
