Strong coupling effective Higgs potential and a first order thermal phase transition from AdS/CFT duality

Apreda, Riccardo, Erdmenger, Johanna, Evans, Nick and Guralnik, Zachary (2005) Strong coupling effective Higgs potential and a first order thermal phase transition from AdS/CFT duality. Physical Review D, 71 (12), 126002-[11pp]. (doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.71.126002).

Record type: Article

Abstract

We use anti–de Sitter/conformal field theory duality to study the thermodynamics of a strongly coupled [script N]=2 supersymmetric large Nc SU(Nc) gauge theory with Nf=2 fundamental hypermultiplets. At finite temperature T and isospin chemical potential µ, a potential on the Higgs branch is generated, corresponding to a potential on the moduli space of instantons in the anti–de Sitter description. For µ=0, there is a known first order phase transition around a critical temperature Tc. We find that the Higgs vacuum expectation value is a suitable order parameter for this transition; for T>Tc, the theory is driven to a nontrivial point on the Higgs branch. For µ[not-equal]0 and T=0, the Higgs potential is unbounded from below, leading to an instability of the field theory due to Bose-Einstein condensation.

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