Holographic baryonic matter in a background magnetic field

TL;DR

This paper investigates how baryonic matter influences the chiral phase transition under magnetic fields using holographic models, revealing that magnetic fields can suppress the transition and alter matter phases at high densities.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of magnetic fields on the chiral phase transition and baryonic matter in a holographic QCD model, including comparisons with mean-field approaches.

Findings

Baryonic matter removes the chiral phase transition at moderate magnetic fields.

Strong magnetic fields favor mesonic and quark matter over baryonic matter.

The results suggest magnetic fields significantly affect QCD phase structure.

Abstract

We discuss the effect of baryonic matter on the zero-temperature chiral phase transition at finite chemical potential in the presence of a background magnetic field. The main part of our study is done in the deconfined geometry of the Sakai-Sugimoto model, i.e., at large N_c and strong coupling, with non-antipodal separation of the flavor branes. We find that for not too large magnetic fields baryonic matter completely removes the chiral phase transition: chirally broken matter persists up to arbitrarily large chemical potential. At sufficiently large magnetic fields, baryonic matter becomes disfavored and mesonic matter is directly superseded by quark matter. In order to discuss the possible relevance of our results to QCD, we compute the baryon onset in a relativistic mean-field model including the anomalous magnetic moment and point out the differences to our holographic calculation.