Heavy Quark Potential at Finite Temperature in a Dual Gravity Closer to Large N QCD

TL;DR

This paper develops a holographic model inspired by Klebanov-Strassler geometry to compute the heavy quark potential at finite temperature, capturing RG flow and confining effects absent in simpler models, revealing new features like a confining term and an imaginary component.

Contribution

It introduces a geometry that incorporates RG flow similar to QCD into the holographic calculation of the heavy quark potential, including confining terms at finite temperature.

Findings

Potential contains confining terms at T=0 and T≠0.

Potential develops a negative imaginary part above a critical separation.

Behavior differs from standard Debye screening predictions.

Abstract

In gauge-gravity duality, the heavy quark potential at finite temperature is usually calculated with the pure AdS background, which does not capture the renormalization group (RG) running in the gauge theory part. In addition, the potential does not contain any confining term in the deconfined phase. Following the Klebanov-Strassler geometry, we employ a geometry, which captures the RG flow similar to QCD, to obtain the heavy quark potential by analytically continuing the string configurations into the complex plane. In addition to the attractive terms, the obtained potential has confining terms both at $T = 0$ and $T \neq 0 $, compared to the calculations usually done in the literature, where only the Coulomb-like term is present in the deconfined phase. The potential also develops an (negative) imaginary part above a critical separation, $r_c (= 0.53 z_h )$. Moreover, our potential exhibits a behavior different from the usual Debye screening obtained from perturbation theory.