Thermal dynamics of quarks and mesons $ \mathcal{N} = {2^*} $ Yang-Mills theory

Abstract

We study the dynamics of quenched fundamental matter in \( \mathcal{N} = {2^*} \) supersymmetric large N c SU(N c ) Yang-Mills theory, extending our earlier work to finite temperature. We use probe D7-branes in the holographically dual thermalized generalization of the \( \mathcal{N} = {2^*} \) Pilch-Warner gravitational background found by Buchel and Liu. Such a system provides an opportunity to study how key features of the dynamics are affected by being in a non-conformal setting where there is an intrinsic scale, set here by the mass, m H , of a hypermultiplet. Such studies are motivated by connections to experimental studies of the quark-gluon plasma at RHIC and LHC, where the microscopic theory of the constituents, QCD, has a scale, ΛQCD. We show that the binding energy of mesons in the \( \mathcal{N} = {2^*} \) theory is increased in the presence of the scale m H , and that subsequently the meson-melting temperature is higher than for the conformal case.