The Stress-Energy Tensor of Flavor Fields from AdS/CFT

TL;DR

This paper employs AdS/CFT to analyze the transport properties and stress-energy tensor contributions of flavor fields in a strongly coupled super-Yang-Mills plasma, revealing energy loss mechanisms and their regulation.

Contribution

It provides a novel calculation of the flavor fields' stress-energy tensor and energy loss rates in a holographic plasma with external fields and chemical potential.

Findings

Infrared divergences in the stress-energy tensor due to energy loss.

Regulation and extraction of energy and momentum loss rates.

Validation of results in divergence-free limits.

Abstract

We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to study the transport properties of massive N=2 hypermultiplet fields in an N=4 SU(Nc) super-Yang-Mills theory plasma in the large Nc, large 't Hooft coupling limit, and in the presence of a baryon number chemical potential and external electric and magnetic fields. In particular, we compute the flavor fields' contribution to the stress-energy tensor. We find infrared divergences in the stress-energy tensor, arising from the flavor fields' constant rate of energy and momentum loss. We regulate these divergences and extract the energy and momentum loss rates from the divergent terms. We also check our result in various limits in which the divergences are absent. The supergravity dual is a system of D7-branes, with a particular configuration of worldvolume fields, probing an AdS-Schwarzschild background. The supergravity calculation amounts to computing the stress-energy tensor of the D7-branes.