Holographic Hadrons in a Confining Finite Density Medium

TL;DR

This paper investigates how meson spectra are affected by finite baryon density in a confining gauge theory using a holographic dual, revealing spectral flow and mass reduction phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic model incorporating finite baryon density effects on hadrons in a confining, non-supersymmetric setting with a running dilaton.

Findings

Meson masses decrease with increasing baryon density for large quark masses.

Spectral flow occurs as baryon density varies, especially at larger quark masses.

Complex spectral behavior is observed at very small quark masses.

Abstract

We study a sector of the hadron spectrum in the presence of finite baryon density. We use a non-supersymmetric gravity dual to a confining guage theory which exhibits a running dilaton. The interaction of mesons with the finite density medium is encoded in the dual theory by a force balancing between flavor D7-branes and a baryon vertex provided by a wrapped D5-brane. When the current quark mass m_q is sufficiently large, the meson mass reduces, exhibiting an interesting spectral flow as we increase the baryon density while it has a more complicated behaviour for very small m_q.