Holography, heavy-quark free energy, and the QCD phase diagram

Abstract

We use gauge/string duality to investigate the free energy of two static color sources (a heavy-quark--antiquark pair) in a Yang-Mills theory in strongly interacting matter, varying temperature and chemical potential. The dual space geometry is anti--de Sitter with a charged black hole to describe finite temperature and density in the boundary theory, and we also include a background warp factor to generate confinement. The resulting deconfinement line in the $\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{-}T$ plane is similar to the one obtained by lattice and effective models of QCD.