Confinement/deconfinement transition from symmetry breaking in gauge/gravity duality

TL;DR

This paper investigates how symmetry-breaking quantum phase transitions in gauge/gravity duality induce simultaneous confinement/deconfinement transitions, revealing a continuous transition for charged condensates and implications for effective field theories.

Contribution

It demonstrates that symmetry breaking in a holographic setup directly causes deconfinement, with a novel continuous transition for charged condensates contrary to Ginzburg-Landau expectations.

Findings

Symmetry breaking triggers immediate deconfinement transition.

Charged condensates lead to continuous phase transitions.

The mechanism relates to deconfined criticality and has applications in quantum magnetic systems.

Abstract

We study the confinement/deconfinement transition in a strongly coupled system triggered by an independent symmetry-breaking quantum phase transition in gauge/gravity duality. The gravity dual is an Einstein-scalar-dilaton system with AdS near-boundary behavior and soft wall interior at zero scalar condensate. We study the cases of neutral and charged condensate separately. In the former case the condensation breaks the discrete $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry while a charged condensate breaks the continuous $U(1)$ symmetry. After the condensation of the order parameter, the non-zero vacuum expectation value of the scalar couples to the dilaton, changing the soft wall geometry into a non-confining and anisotropically scale-invariant infrared metric. In other words, the formation of long-range order is immediately followed by the deconfinement transition and the two critical points coincide. The confined phase has a scale -- the confinement scale (energy gap) which vanishes in the deconfined case. Therefore, the breaking of the symmetry of the scalar ($\mathbb{Z}_2$ or $U(1)$) in turn restores the scaling symmetry in the system and neither phase has a higher overall symmetry than the other. When the scalar is charged the phase transition is continuous which goes against the Ginzburg-Landau theory where such transitions generically only occur discontinuously. This phenomenon has some commonalities with the scenario of deconfined criticality. The mechanism we have found has applications mainly in effective field theories such as quantum magnetic systems. We briefly discuss these applications and the relation to real-world systems.