Unquenched flavor on the Higgs branch

TL;DR

This paper constructs gravity duals for Higgs branches in super Yang-Mills theories with unquenched flavors, incorporating backreaction effects and non-Abelian instantons, revealing cascading and walking behaviors in the holographic models.

Contribution

It provides explicit gravity dual constructions for Higgs branches with unquenched flavors, including backreaction and instanton effects, extending previous quenched approximations.

Findings

Backreacted gravity solutions with flavor branes and instantons.

Cascading-like behavior with varying effective color number.

Possible quasi-conformal (walking) regions in 3D models.

Abstract

We construct the gravity duals of the Higgs branches of three-dimensional (four-dimensional) super Yang-Mills theories coupled to $N_\textrm{f}$ quark flavors. The effect of the quarks on the color degrees of freedom is included, and corresponds on the gravity side to the backreaction of $N_\textrm{f}$ flavor D6-branes (D7-branes) on the background of $N_\textrm{c}$ color D2-branes (D3-branes). The Higgsing of the gauge group arises from the dissolution of some color branes inside the flavor branes. The dissolved color branes are represented by non-Abelian instantons whose backreaction is also included. The result is a cascading-like solution in which the effective number of color branes varies along the holographic direction. In the three-dimensional case the solution may include an arbitrary number of quasi-conformal (walking) regions.