Flavoured largeNgauge theory in an external magnetic field

Abstract

We consider a D7-brane probe of AdS5 × S5 in the presence of pure gauge B-field. In the dual gauge theory, the B-field couples to the fundamental matter introduced by the D7-brane and acts as an external magnetic field. The B-field supports a 6-form Ramond-Ramond potential on the D7-branes world volume that breaks the supersymmetry and enables the dual gauge theory to develop a non-zero fermionic condensate. We explore the dependence of the fermionic condensate on the bare quark mass mq and show that at zero bare quark mass a chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken. A study of the meson spectrum reveals a coupling between the vector and scalar modes, and in the limit of weak magnetic field we observe Zeeman splitting of the states. We also observe the characteristic √mq dependence of the ground state corresponding to the Goldstone boson of spontaneously broken chiral symmetry.