Thermal Dynamics of Quarks and Mesons in N=2* Yang-Mills Theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the presence of an intrinsic scale in a non-conformal supersymmetric gauge theory affects meson stability and melting temperatures at finite temperature, using holographic duality techniques.

Contribution

It extends previous holographic studies to finite temperature in a non-conformal setting, revealing how the scale influences meson binding energies and melting points.

Findings

Meson binding energy increases with the scale $m_H$.

Meson-melting temperature is higher in the non-conformal theory.

Study connects holographic models to quark-gluon plasma physics.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of quenched fundamental matter in $\mathcal{N}=2^\ast$ supersymmetric large $N_c$ $SU(N_c)$ Yang-Mills theory, extending our earlier work to finite temperature. We use probe D7-branes in the holographically dual thermalized generalization of the $\mathcal{N}=2^\ast$ Pilch-Warner gravitational background found by Buchel and Liu. Such a system provides an opportunity to study how key features of the dynamics are affected by being in a non-conformal setting where there is an intrinsic scale, set here by the mass, $m_H$, of a hypermultiplet. Such studies are motivated by connections to experimental studies of the quark-gluon plasma at RHIC and LHC, where the microscopic theory of the constituents, QCD, has a scale, $\Lambda_{\rm QCD}$. We show that the binding energy of mesons in the $\mathcal{N}=2^\ast$ theory is increased in the presence of the scale $m_H$, and that subsequently the meson-melting temperature is higher than for the conformal case.