Holographic Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper develops a holographic dual gravity model for heavy atomic nuclei using AdS/CFT, enabling the calculation of nuclear spectra and collective excitations, with results aligning with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel holographic gravity framework for heavy nuclei, connecting D-brane configurations to nuclear spectra in a large A limit.

Findings

Discrete nuclear states with gaps matching experimental data

Dual gravity describes collective excitations of nucleons

Spectra computed from the model show good agreement with observations

Abstract

We provide a dual gravity description of heavy atomic nuclei, via AdS/CFT correspondence. In holographic QCD such as Sakai-Sugimoto model, baryons are D-branes wrapping a sphere in 10 dimensional curved spacetime, so any nucleus is a collection of $A$ such D-branes where $A$ is mass number of the nucleus. Quantum theory on the nucleus is ADHM-like U(A) Yang-Mills-Higgs theory on the sphere. Taking a large $A$ limit (corresponding to heavy nuclei) leads to a dual gravity describing collective excitataions of constituent nucleons of the heavy nucleus. This dual gravity computes spectra of the heavy nucleus, and gives discrete states whose gap roughly agrees with experimental nuclear data.