Glueball-meson mixing in holographic QCD

Abstract

Top-down holographic QCD models often work in the “probe” (or “quenched”) limit, which assumes that the number of colors is much greater than the number of flavors. Relaxing this limit is essential to a fuller understanding of holography and more accurate phenomenological predictions. In this work, we focus on a mixing of glueball and meson mass eigenstates that arises from the DBI action as a finite Nf/Nc effect. For concreteness, we work in the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model, and show that this mixing must be treated in conjunction with the backreaction of the flavor branes onto the background geometry. Including the backreaction with the simplification that it is “smeared out” over the compact transverse direction, we derive a corrected effective action for the vector glueball and scalar states. Along the way, we observe a Stückelberg-like mechanism that restores translation invariance in the transverse direction. We also derive a general technique, that lends itself easily to numerics, for finding mass eigenstates of Lagrangians with vector-scalar mixing. We then calculate the first order corrections to the mass spectra of both the vector and scalar particles, and show that the term that explicitly mixes vector and scalar states is the most significant correction to the masses of low-lying scalar mesons.