Heavy Quark Potential from Gauge/Gravity Duality: A Large D Analysis

TL;DR

This paper uses gauge/gravity duality in the large-D limit to analyze the heavy-quark potential, revealing that massless modes near quarks dominate corrections to the effective string energy, with implications for lattice QCD.

Contribution

It introduces a large-D approximation to compute the heavy-quark potential, highlighting the role of massless modes in energy corrections, which is a novel approach in gauge/gravity duality studies.

Findings

Large-D limit simplifies the heavy-quark potential calculation.

Massless modes near quarks dominate the correction to the ground-state energy.

Predicted corrections are observable in upcoming lattice QCD simulations.

Abstract

The heavy-quark potential is calculated in the framework of gauge/gravity duality using the large-D approximation, where D is the number of dimensions transverse to the flux tube connecting a quark and an antiquark in a flat D+2-dimensional spacetime. We find that in the large-D limit the leading correction to the ground-state energy, as given by an effective Nambu-Goto string, arises not from the heavy modes but from the behavior of the massless modes in the vicinity of the quark and the antiquark. We estimate this correction and find that it should be visible in the near-future lattice QCD calculations of the heavy-quark potential.