Flavor-symmetry Breaking with Charged Probes

TL;DR

This paper investigates how brane/anti-brane pairs with D3 charge in AdS/CFT can recombine, leading to flavor-symmetry breaking in the dual gauge theory, and analyzes their thermodynamics under magnetic fields.

Contribution

It introduces a model of flavor-symmetry breaking via brane recombination in AdS/CFT and explores the thermodynamic behavior under external magnetic fields.

Findings

Recombination results in a transition from U(N)×U(N) to diagonal U(N) flavor symmetry.

External magnetic fields influence the stability and phase structure of the brane configurations.

The study provides insights into defect dynamics and symmetry breaking in holographic duals.

Abstract

We discuss the recombination of brane/anti-brane pairs carrying $D3$ brane charge in $AdS_5 \times S^5$. These configurations are dual to co-dimension one defects in the ${\cal N}=4$ super-Yang-Mills description. Due to their $D3$ charge, these defects are actually domain walls in the dual gauge theory, interpolating between vacua of different gauge symmetry. A pair of unjoined defects each carry localized $(2+1)$ dimensional fermions and possess a global $U(N)\times U(N)$ flavor symmetry while the recombined brane/anti-brane pairs exhibit only a diagonal U(N). We study the thermodynamics of this flavor-symmetry breaking under the influence of external magnetic field.