Monopole correlations in holographically flavored liquids

TL;DR

This paper investigates monopole correlations in holographic liquids with flavor, revealing monopole condensation in gapped phases and unique correlation behaviors at finite density, linking holography, confinement, and many-body physics.

Contribution

It provides a holographic analysis of monopole operator correlations, including monopole condensation and novel finite-density correlation functions.

Findings

Monopole condensation corresponds to flavor brane capping in the bulk.

In charge-gapped phases, monopole operators condense.

At finite density, monopole correlations are power law in time and Gaussian in space.

Abstract

Many-body systems with a conserved U(1) current in (2+1) dimensions may be probed by weakly gauging this current and studying correlation functions of magnetic monopole operators in the resulting dynamical gauge theory. We study such monopole correlations in holographic liquids with fundamental flavor, where the monopole operator is dual to a magnetically charged particle in the bulk. In charge-gapped phases the monopole operator is expected to condense. We show that this condensation is holographically dual to the capping off of the bulk flavor brane and compute the monopole condensate. We argue that from the lower-dimensional point of view this may be understood as a simple example of confinement of a gauge field in the bulk. In a compressible finite-density phase we present a novel calculation of the monopole correlation in space and time: the correlation is power law in time but is Gaussian in space due to interaction with the background charge density.