The thermal phase transition in a QCD-like holographic model

TL;DR

This paper studies the high-temperature behavior of a holographic QCD-like model, revealing a Hawking-Page phase transition associated with deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration, using supergravity calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a dilaton flow deformation of AdS/CFT to model QCD-like phase transitions, including deconfinement and chiral symmetry restoration, within a supergravity framework.

Findings

Identification of a Hawking-Page transition as deconfinement

Chiral symmetry restoration coincides with deconfinement transition

Dissolution of mesons and Goldstone modes into the thermal bath

Abstract

We investigate the high temperature phase of a dilaton flow deformation of the AdS/CFT Correspondence. We argue that these geometries should be interpreted as the N=4 gauge theory perturbed by a SO(6) invariant scalar mass and that the high-temperature phase is just the well-known AdS-Schwarzschild solution. We compute, within supergravity, the resulting Hawking-Page phase transition which in this model can be interpreted as a deconfining transition in which the vev for the operator Tr F^2 dissolves. In the presence of quarks the model also displays a simultaneous chiral symmetry restoring transition with the Goldstone mode and other quark bound states dissolving into the thermal bath.