(Super)Yang-Mills at Finite Heavy-Quark Density

TL;DR

This paper explores the gravitational duals of high-density heavy-quark Yang-Mills theories across various dimensions, revealing complex IR geometries, phase structures, and exact black brane solutions relevant for understanding strongly coupled gauge theories.

Contribution

It provides new gravitational solutions for Yang-Mills theories with heavy-quark density, including IR scaling geometries and exact black brane solutions, extending previous holographic models.

Findings

IR geometries exhibit hyperscaling violation and fixed exponents

Special case in 5D yields an $AdS_3$ factor upon uplift

Exact black brane solutions describe low-temperature thermodynamics

Abstract

We study the gravitational duals of $d$-dimensional Yang-Mills theories with $d\leq 6$ in the presence of an ${\cal O} (N^2)$ density of heavy quarks, with $N$ the number of colors. For concreteness we focus on maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills, but our results apply to a larger class of theories with or without supersymmetry. The gravitational solutions describe renormalization group flows towards infrared scaling geometries characterized by fixed dynamical and hyperscaling-violating exponents. The special case $d=5$ yields an $AdS_3 \times \mathbb{R}^4 \times S^4$ geometry upon uplifting to M-theory. We discuss the multitude of physical scales that separate different dynamical regimes along the flows, as well as the validity of the supergravity description. We also present exact black brane solutions that encode the low-temperature thermodynamics.