Screening effects on meson masses from holography

TL;DR

This paper investigates how screening effects influence meson masses in strongly coupled SQCD-like theories using holographic duality, focusing on D3-D7 brane configurations and their UV cutoff adaptations.

Contribution

It introduces a modified holographic approach to analyze meson spectra in theories with UV pathologies, accounting for the effects of flavor number and mass.

Findings

Meson spectra are largely independent of UV cutoffs.

Spectra vary systematically with flavor number and mass.

Holographic methods can be adapted for theories with intrinsic cutoffs.

Abstract

We study the spectra of scalar and vector mesons in four dimensional strongly coupled SQCD-like theories in the Veneziano limit. The gauge theories describe the low energy dynamics of intersecting D3 and D7-branes on the singular and deformed conifold and their strong coupling regime can be explored by means of dual fully backreacted supergravity backgrounds. The mesons we focus on are dual to fluctuations of the worldvolume gauge field on a probe D7-brane in these backgrounds. As we will comment in detail, the general occurrence of various UV pathologies in the D3-D7 set-ups under study, forces us to adapt the standard holographic recipes to theories with intrinsic cutoffs. Just as for QED, the low energy spectra for mesonic-like bound states will be consistent and largely independent of the UV cutoffs. We will study in detail how these spectra vary with the number of the fundamental sea flavors and their mass.