Holographic Gauge Theory Research Articles

Wilson loops and wormholes

We analyse the properties of Wilson loop observables for holographic gauge theories, when the dual bulk geometries have a single and/or multiple boundaries (Euclidean spacetime wormholes). Such observables lead to a generalisation and refinement of the characterisation in [1] based on the compressibility of cycles and the pinching limit of higher genus Riemann surfaces, since they carry information about the dynamics and phase structure of the dual gauge theory of an arbitrary dimensionality. Finally, we describe how backreacting correlated observables such as Wilson loops can lead to wormhole saddles in the dual gravitational path integral, by taking advantage of a representation theoretic entanglement structure proposed in [13, 15].

Speeding up the spread of quantum information in chaotic systems

We explore the effect of introducing mild nonlocality into otherwise local, chaotic quantum systems, on the rate of information spreading and associated rates of entanglement generation and operator growth. We consider various forms of nonlocality, both in 1-dimensional spin chain models and in holographic gauge theories, comparing the phenomenology of each. Generically, increasing the level of nonlocality increases the rate of information spreading, but in lattice models we find instances where these rates are slightly suppressed.

Is the chiral magnetic effect fast enough?

It depends: While we find within holography that the lifetime of the magnetic field for collider energies like the ones achieved at RHIC is long enough to build up the chiral magnetic current, the lifetime of the magnetic field at LHC seems to be too short. We study the real time evolution of the chiral magnetic effect out-of-equilibrium in strongly coupled holographic gauge theories. We consider the backreaction of the magnetic field onto the geometry and monitor pressure and chiral magnetic current. Our findings show that generically at small magnetic field the pressure builds up faster than the chiral magnetic current whereas at strong magnetic field the opposite is true. At large charge we also find that equilibration is delayed significantly due to long lived oscillations. We also match the parameters of our model to QCD parameters and draw lessons of possible relevance to the realization of the chiral magnetic effect in heavy ion collisions. In particular, we find an equilibration time of about $\sim0.35$ fm/c in presence of the chiral anomaly for plasma temperatures of order $T\sim300-400$ MeV.

Exploring the membrane theory of entanglement dynamics

Recently an effective membrane theory valid in a “hydrodynamic limit” was proposed to describe entanglement dynamics of chaotic systems based on results in random quantum circuits and holographic gauge theories. In this paper, we show that this theory is robust under a large set of generalizations. In generic quench protocols we find that the membrane couples geometrically to hydrodynamics, joining quenches are captured by branes in the effective theory, and the entanglement of time evolved local operators can be computed by probing a time fold geometry with the membrane. We also demonstrate that the structure of the effective theory does not change under finite coupling corrections holographically dual to higher derivative gravity and that subleading orders in the hydrodynamic expansion can be incorporated by including higher derivative terms in the effective theory.

Chaos in the butterfly cone

A simple probe of chaos and operator growth in many-body quantum systems is the out of time ordered four point function. In a large class of local systems, the effects of chaos in this correlator build up exponentially fast inside the so called butterfly cone. It has been previously observed that the growth of these effects is organized along rays and can be characterized by a velocity dependent Lyapunov exponent, λ(v). We show that this exponent is bounded inside the butterfly cone as λ(v) ≤ 2πT (1 − |v|/vB), where T is the temperature and vB is the butterfly speed. This result generalizes the chaos bound of Maldacena, Shenker and Stanford. We study λ(v) in some examples such as two dimensional SYK models and holographic gauge theories, and observe that in these systems the bound gets saturated at some critical velocity v*< vB. In this sense, boosting a system enhances chaos. We discuss the connection to conformal Regge theory, where λ(v) is related to the spin of the leading large N Regge trajectory, and controls the four point function in an interpolating regime between the Regge and the light cone limit. Finally, we comment on the generalization of the chaos bound to boosted and rotating ensembles and clarify some recent results on this in the literature.

Critical point in a holographic defect field theory

We study a holographic gauge theory dual to the D3/D5 intersection. We consider a pure gauge B-field flux through the internal two-sphere wrapped by the probe D5-brane, which corresponds to a non-commutative configuration of adjoint scalars. There is a domain wall separating the theory into regions with different ranks of the adjoint group. At zero temperature the theory is supersymmetric and at finite temperature there is a critical point of a second order phase transition. We study the corresponding critical exponents and find that the second derivatives of the free energy, with respect to the bare mass and the magnetic field, diverge with a critical exponent of −2/3.

The Schwarzian theory \u2014 origins

In this paper we further study the 1d Schwarzian theory, the universal low-energy limit of Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models, using the link with 2d Liouville theory. We provide a path-integral derivation of the structural link between both theories, and study the relation between 3d gravity, 2d Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity, 2d Liouville and the 1d Schwarzian. We then generalize the Schwarzian double-scaling limit to rational models, relevant for SYK-type models with internal symmetries. We identify the holographic gauge theory as a 2d BF theory and compute correlators of the holographically dual 1d particle-on-a-group action, decomposing these into diagrammatic building blocks, in a manner very similar to the Schwarzian theory.

Evolution of the mean jet shape and dijet asymmetry distribution of an ensemble of holographic jets in strongly coupled plasma

Some of the most important experimentally accessible probes of the quark- gluon plasma (QGP) produced in heavy ion collisions come from the analysis of how the shape and energy of sprays of energetic particles produced within a cone with a specified opening angle (jets) in a hard scattering are modified by their passage through the strongly coupled, liquid, QGP. We model an ensemble of back-to-back dijets for the purpose of gaining a qualitative understanding of how the shapes of the individual jets and the asymmetry in the energy of the pairs of jets in the ensemble are modified by their passage through an expanding cooling droplet of strongly coupled plasma, in the model in a holographic gauge theory that is dual to a 4+1-dimensional black-hole spacetime that is asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS). We build our model by constructing an ensemble of strings in the dual gravitational description of the gauge theory. We model QCD jets in vacuum using strings whose endpoints are moving “downward” into the gravitational bulk spacetime with some fixed small angle, an angle that represents the opening angle (ratio of jet mass to jet energy) that the QCD jet would have in vacuum. Such strings must be moving through the gravitational bulk at (close to) the speed of light; they must be (close to) null. This condition does not specify the energy distribution along the string, meaning that it does not specify the shape of the jet being modeled. We study the dynamics of strings that are initially not null and show that strings with a wide range of initial conditions rapidly accelerate and become null and, as they do, develop a similar distribution of their energy density. We use this distribution of the energy density along the string, choose an ensemble of strings whose opening angles and energies are distributed as in perturbative QCD, and show that we can then fix one of the two model parameters such that the mean jet shape for the jets in the ensemble that we have built matches that measured in proton-proton collisions reasonably well. This is a novel way for hybridizing relevant inputs from perturbative QCD and a strongly coupled holographic gauge theory in the service of modeling jets in QGP. We send our ensemble of strings through an expanding cooling droplet of strongly coupled plasma, choosing the second model parameter so as to get a reasonable value for RAAjet, the suppression in the number of jets, and study how the mean jet shape and the dijet asymmetry are modified, comparing both to measurements from heavy ion collisions at the LHC.

Chiral symmetry of SYM theory in hyperbolic space at finite temperature

We study a holographic gauge theory living in the AdS$_4$ space-time at finite temperature. The gravity dual is obtained as a solution of the type IIB superstring theory with two free parameters, which correspond to four dimensional (4D) cosmological constant ($\lambda$) and the dark radiation ($C$) respectively. The theory studied here is in confining and chiral symmetry broken phase for $\lambda <0$ and small $C$. When $C$ is increased, the transition to the deconfinement phase has been observed at a finite value of $C/|\lambda|$. It is shown here that the chiral symmetry is still broken for a finite range of $C/|\lambda|$ in the deconfinement phase. In other words, the chiral phase transition occurs at a larger value of $C/|\lambda|$ than the one of the deconfinement transition. So there is a parameter range of a new deconfinement phase with broken chiral symmetry. In order to study the properties of this phase, we performed a holographic analysis for the meson mass-spectrum and other quantities in terms of the probe D7 brane. The results of this analysis are compared with a linear sigma model. Furthermore, the entanglement entropy is examined to search for a sign of the chiral phase trantion. Several comments are given for these analyses.

Glueball instability and thermalization driven by dark radiation

We study glueballs in the holographic gauge theories living in a curved space-time. The dual bulk is obtained as a solution of the type IIB superstring theory with two parameters, which correspond to four dimensional (4D) cosmological constant $\lambda$ and the dark radiation $C$ respectively. The theory is in the confining phase for $\lambda <0$ and small $C$, then we observe stable glueball states in this theory. However, the stability of the glueball states is lost when the density of the dark radiation ($C$) increases and exceeds a critical point. Above this point, the dark radiation works as the heat bath of the Yang-Mills theory since the event horizon appears. Thus the system is thermalized, and the theory is in a finite temperature deconfinement phase, namely in the QGP phase. We observe this transition process through the glueball spectra which varies dramatically with $C$. We also examined the entanglement entropy of the system to find a clue of this phase transition and the role of the dark radiation $C$ in the entanglement entropy.

Metastability and instability in holographic gauge theories

We review and extend previous results regarding the stability and thermodynamics of Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime at finite temperature. Using a combination of analytic and numerical techniques, we compute the energy, temperature, and entropy of perfect fluid stars in asymptotically AdS spacetimes. We find that at sufficiently high temperature (in the canonical ensemble) or energy (in the microcanonical ensemble) these configurations develop dynamical instabilities, which presumably lead to the formation of a black hole. We extend our analysis to the case of $AdS \times S$ compactifications stabilized by flux (such as those that arise in supergravity and string theory), and find that the inclusion of the sphere does not substantially alter these results. We then map out the phase structure of these theories in the canonical and microcanonical ensembles, paying attention to inequivalence of these ensembles for global anti-de Sitter space. With a certain scaling limit, the critical temperature can be parametrically lower than the string temperature, so that supergravity is a good description at the instability point. We comment on the implications of this for the unitarity of black holes.

Holographic cold nuclear matter and neutron star

We have previously found a new phase of cold nuclear matter based on a holographic gauge theory, where baryons are introduced as instanton gas in the probe [Formula: see text] branes. In our model, we could obtain the equation of state (EOS) of our nuclear matter by introducing Fermi momentum. Then, here we apply this model to the neutron star and study its mass and radius by solving the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff (TOV) equations in terms of the EOS given here. We give some comments for our holographic model from a viewpoint of the other field theoretical approaches.

Energy trapping from Hagedorn densities of states

In this note, we construct simple stochastic toy models for holographic gauge theories in which distributions of energy on a collection of sites evolve by a master equation with some specified transition rates. We build in only energy conservation, locality, and the standard thermodynamic requirement that all states with a given energy are equally likely in equilibrium. In these models, we investigate the qualitative behavior of the dynamics of the energy distributions for different choices of the density of states for the individual sites. For typical field theory densities of states (\log(\rho(E)) ~ E^{\alpha<1}), the model gives diffusive behavior in which initially localized distributions of energy spread out relatively quickly. For large N gauge theories with gravitational duals, the density of states for a finite volume of field theory degrees of freedom typically includes a Hagedorn regime (\log(\rho(E)) ~ E). We find that this gives rise to a trapping of energy in subsets of degrees of freedom for parametrically long time scales before the energy leaks away. We speculate that this Hagedorn trapping may be part of a holographic explanation for long-lived gravitational bound states (black holes) in gravitational theories.

Holographic cold nuclear matter as dilute instanton gas

We study cold nuclear matter based on the holographic gauge theory, where baryons are introduced as the instantons in the probe D8/D8 branes according to the Sakai-Sugimoto model. Within a dilute gas approximation of instantons, we search for the stable states via the variational method and fix the instanton size. We find the first order phase transition from the vacuum to the nuclear matter phase as we increase the chemical potential. At the critical chemical potential, we could see a jump in the baryon density from zero to a finite definite value. While the size of the baryon in the nuclear matter is rather small compared to the nucleus near the transition point, where the charge density is also small, it increases with the baryon density. Those behaviors obtained here are discussed by relating them to the force between baryons.

Holographic glueballs and infrared wall driven by dilaton

We study glueballs in the holographic gauge theories, supersymmetric and non-super symmetric cases, which are given by the type IIB superstring solutions with non-trivial dilaton. In both cases, the dilaton reflects the condensate of the gauge field strength, $<F^2>$, which is responsible to the linear confining potential between the quark and anti-quark. Then we could see the meson spectra. On the other hand, the glueball spectra are not found in the supersymmetric case. We need a sharp wall, which corresponds to an infrared cutoff, in order to obtain the glueballs. In the non-supersymmetric case, the quantized glueballs are actually observed due to the existence of such a wall driven by the dilaton. The strings and D-branes introduced as building blocks of hadrons are pushed out by this wall, and we could see the Regge behavior of the higher spin meson and glueball states. We find that the slope of the glueball trajectory is half of the flavor meson's one. As for the low spin glueballs, they are studied by solving the fluctuations of the bulk fields, and their discrete spectra are shown.

Holographic anomalous conductivities and the chiral magnetic effect

We calculate anomaly induced conductivities from a holographic gauge theory model using Kubo formulas, making a clear conceptual distinction between thermodynamic state variables such as chemical potentials and external background fields. This allows us to pinpoint ambiguities in previous holographic calculations of the chiral magnetic conductivity. We also calculate the corresponding anomalous current three-point functions in special kinematic regimes. We compare the holographic results to weak coupling calculations using both dimensional regularization and cutoff regularization. In order to reproduce the weak coupling results it is necessary to allow for singular holographic gauge field configurations when a chiral chemical potential is introduced for a chiral charge defined through a gauge invariant but non-conserved chiral density. We argue that this is appropriate for actually addressing charge separation due to the chiral magnetic effect.

Baryon charge from embedding topology and a continuous meson spectrum in a new holographic gauge theory

We study a new holographic gauge theory based on probe D4-branes in the background dual to D4-branes on a circle with antiperiodic boundary conditions for fermions. Field theory configurations with baryons correspond to smooth embeddings of the probe D4-branes with nontrivial winding around an S 4 in the geometry. As a consequence, physics of baryons and nuclei can be studied reliably in this model using the abelian Born-Infeld action. However, surprisingly, we find that the meson spectrum is not discrete. This is related to a curious result that the action governing small fluctuations of the gauge field on the probe brane is the five-dimensional Maxwell action in Minkowski space despite the non-trivial embedding of the probe brane in the curved background geometry.

Notes on the bulk viscosity of holographic gauge theory plasmas

A novel technique is used to compute the bulk viscosity of high temperature holographic gauge theory plasmas with softly broken conformal symmetry. Working in a black hole background which corresponds to a non-trivial solution to the Navier-Stokes equation, and using a Ward identity for the trace of the stress-energy tensor, it is possible to obtain an analytic expression for the bulk viscosity. This can be used to verify the high temperature limit of a conjectured bound on the bulk viscosity for these theories. The bound is saturated when the conformal symmetry-breaking operator becomes marginal.

Magnetic Catalysis of Chiral Symmetry Breaking: A Holographic Prospective

We review a recent investigation of the effect of magnetic catalysis of mass generation in holographic Yang‐Mills theories. We aim at a self‐contained and pedagogical form of the review. We provide a brief field theory background and review the basics of holographic flavordynamics. The main part of the paper investigates the influence of external magnetic field to holographic gauge theories dual to the D3/D5‐ and D3/D7‐brane intersections. Among the observed phenomena are the spontaneous breaking of a global internal symmetry, Zeeman splitting of the energy levels, and the existence of pseudo, Goldstone modes. An analytic derivation of the Gell‐Mann‐Oaks‐Renner relation for the D3/D7 set up is reviewed. In the D3/D5 case, the pseudo‐Goldstone modes satisfy nonrelativistic dispersion relation. The studies reviewed confirm the universal nature of the magnetic catalysis of mass generation.

Hot defect superconformal field theory in an external magnetic field

In this paper we investigate the influence of an external magnetic field on a flavoured holographic gauge theory dual to the D3/D5 intersection at finite temperature. Our study shows that the external magnetic field has a freezing effect on the confinement/ deconfinement phase transition. We construct the corresponding phase diagram. We investigate some thermodynamic quantities of the theory. A study of the entropy reveals enhanced relative jump of the entropy at the "chiral" phase transition. A study of the magnetization shows that both the confined and deconfined phases exhibit diamagnetic response. The diamagnetic response in the deconfined phase has a stronger temperature dependence reflecting the temperature dependence of the conductivity. We study the meson spectrum of the theory and analyze the stability of the different phases looking at both normal and quasi-normal semi-classical excitations. For the symmetry breaking phase we analyze the corresponding pseudo-Goldstone modes and prove that they satisfy non-relativistic dispersion relation.