Heavy quark potential with dynamical flavors: a first order transition

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the static potential between quark-antiquark pairs changes in a strongly coupled gauge theory with dynamical flavors, revealing a first order phase transition influenced by quark mass.

Contribution

It introduces a dual string description to analyze the static potential and identifies a first order phase transition dependent on quark mass in the presence of dynamical flavors.

Findings

First order phase transition between linear and Coulomb-like regimes for low quark mass.

Smooth connection of phases above a critical quark mass.

Dependence of quark-antiquark separation on theory parameters.

Abstract

We study the static potential between external quark-antiquark pairs in a strongly coupled gauge theory with a large number of colors and massive dynamical flavors, using a dual string description. When the constituent mass of the dynamical quarks is set below a certain critical value, we find a first order phase transition between a linear and a Coulomb-like regime. Above the critical mass the two phases are smoothly connected. We also study the dependence on the theory parameters of the quark-antiquark separation at which the static configuration decays into specific static-dynamical mesons.