Heavy holographic QCD - ePrints Soton

Kovensky, Nicolas and Schmitt, Andreas (2020) Heavy holographic QCD. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2020 (2), [96]. (doi:10.1007/JHEP02(2020)096).

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Abstract

We study the phase structure of the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model in the plane of temperature and baryon chemical potential, including the effect of a nonzero current quark mass. Our study is performed in the decompactified limit of the model, which, at least regarding the chiral phase transition, appears to be closer to real-world QCD than the original version. Following earlier studies, we account for the quark mass in an effective way based on an open Wilson line operator whose expectation value is identified with the chiral condensate. We find that the quark mass stabilizes a configuration with string sources and point out that this phase plays an important role in the phase diagram. Furthermore, we show that the quark mass breaks up the first-order chiral phase transition curve and introduces critical points to the phase diagram. Similarities of the phase structure to other holographic approaches and to lattice simulations of “heavy QCD” are found and discussed. By making holographic QCD more realistic, our results open the door to a better understanding of real-world strongly coupled hot and dense matter.

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Accepted/In Press date: 1 February 2020

Published date: 17 February 2020

Additional Information: Funding Information: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited Publisher Copyright: © 2020, The Author(s).

Keywords: AdS-CFT Correspondence, Phase Diagram of QCD