Holographic phase transitions at finite baryon density

By Shinpei Kobayashi, D. Mateos, Shunji Matsuura, R. Myers, R. Thomson. 2006

377 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use holographic techniques to study SU(Nc) super Yang-Mills theory coupled to Nf << Nc flavours of fundamental matter at finite temperature and baryon density. We focus on four dimensions, for which the dual description consists of Nf D7-branes in the background of Nc black D3-branes, but our results apply in other dimensions as well. A non-zero chemical potential μb or baryon number density nb is introduced via a nonvanishing worldvolume gauge field on the D7-branes. Ref. [1] identified a first order phase transition at zero density associated with `melting' of the mesons. This extends to a line of phase transitions for small nb, which terminates at a critical point at finite nb. Investigation of the D7-branes' thermodynamics reveals that (∂μb/∂nb)T<0 in a small region of the phase diagram, indicating an instability. We comment on a possible new phase which may appear in this region.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6bc6741257ec87273170af2773a11605d14164b

How researchers see this paper

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. T. Takayanagi
2. R. Myers
3. S. Hartnoll
4. V. Hubeny
5. S. Sachdev
6. T. Nishioka
7. M. Rangamani
8. D. Mateos

Citations in the corpus

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