Charged D3-D7 plasmas: novel solutions, extremality and stability issues

TL;DR

This paper constructs and analyzes charged black hole solutions in holographic models with fundamental matter, examining their thermodynamics, stability, and mesonic spectra, especially near extremality where probe approximations fail.

Contribution

It provides the first-order backreacted charged black hole solutions with dynamical flavors at finite density and explores their stability and mesonic spectra beyond the probe approximation.

Findings

Thermodynamical stability of the solutions.

Failure of the probe approximation near extremality.

No instabilities found in mesonic spectra.

Abstract

We study finite temperature N=4 Super Yang-Mills (and more general gauge theories realized on intersecting D3-D7 branes) in the presence of dynamical massless fundamental matter fields at finite baryon charge density. We construct the holographic dual charged black hole solutions at first order in the flavor backreaction but exact in the charge density. The thermodynamical properties of the dual gauge theories coincide with the ones found in the usual charged D7-probe limit and the system turns out to be thermodynamically stable. By analyzing the higher order correction in the flavor backreaction, we provide a novel argument for the un-reliability of the charged probe approximation (and the present solution) in the extremality limit, i.e. at zero temperature. We then consider scalar mesonic-like bound states, whose spectrum is dual to that of linearized fluctuations of D7-brane worldvolume fields around our gravity backgrounds. In particular we focus on a scalar field saturating the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound in the flavorless limit, and coupled to fields dual to irrelevant operators. By looking at quasinormal modes of this scalar, we find no signals of instabilities in the regime of validity of the solutions.