Klebanov-Witten theory with massive dynamical flavors

TL;DR

This paper constructs a supergravity dual for Klebanov-Witten theory with massive dynamical flavors, analyzing how these flavors influence the theory's behavior, especially the static quark-antiquark potential.

Contribution

It provides the first backreacted supergravity solution for massive flavors in Klebanov-Witten theory using smeared D7-branes, revealing flavor effects on gauge dynamics.

Findings

Massive flavors screen static color charges

The solution features a running effective number of flavors

Flavor parameters significantly affect the quark-antiquark potential

Abstract

We consider the addition of a large number of massive dynamical flavors to the Klebanov-Witten theory, the quiver gauge theory describing the low energy dynamics of Nc D3-branes at the conifold singularity. Massive flavors are introduced by means of Nf D7-branes which are holomorphically embedded and smeared along the transverse directions. After some general comments on the validity of the smearing procedure, we find the full backreacted supergravity solution corresponding to a particular class of massive embeddings. The solution depends on a running effective number of flavors, whose functional form follows from the smeared embedding. The running reflects the integrating in/out of massive degrees of freedom in the dual field theory as the energy scale is changed. We study how the dynamics of the theory depends on the flavor parameters, mainly focusing on the static quark-antiquark potential. As expected, we find that the dynamical flavors tend to screen the static color charges.