Baryon Mass in medium with Holographic QCD

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of baryon mass in a medium using holographic QCD, defining it via the energy of a deformed baryon vertex and analyzing its dependence on density for different quark masses.

Contribution

It introduces a method to define baryon mass in medium through the energy of a deformed baryon vertex satisfying force balance conditions in holographic QCD.

Findings

Baryon mass decreases monotonically with density for heavy quarks.

Baryon mass exhibits a minimum at certain density for light quarks.

Stable baryon vertex configurations exist only in some confining backgrounds.

Abstract

We study the baryon vertex (BV) in the presence of medium using DBI action and the force balance condition between BV and the probe branes. We note that a stable BV configuration exists only in some of the confining backgrounds. For the system of finite density, the issue is whether there is a canonical definition for the baryon mass in the medium. In this work, we define it as the energy of the deformed BV satisfying the force balance condition (FBC) with the probe brane. With FBC, lengths of the strings attached to the BV tend to be zero while the compact branes are enlongated to mimic the string. We attribute the deformation energy of the probe brane to the baryon-baryon interaction. We show that for a system with heavy quarks the baryon mass drops monotonically as a function of density while it has minimum in case of light quark system.