Holographic flows and thermodynamics of Polyakov loop impurities

TL;DR

This paper investigates holographic models of heavy quark impurities in strongly coupled N=4 SYM, revealing how different brane embeddings describe impurity screening and their thermodynamic properties.

Contribution

It introduces non-conformal D3- and D5-brane probe embeddings that interpolate between different representations, providing new insights into impurity screening and thermodynamics in holography.

Findings

D5-brane embeddings show multiple thermodynamic branches.

D3-brane solutions interpolate between symmetric and fundamental representations.

Thermal D3-brane interpolations do not seem to exist.

Abstract

We study holographic probes dual to heavy quark impurities interpolating between fundamental and symmetric/antisymmetric tensor representations in strongly coupled N=4 supersymmetric gauge theory. These correspond to non-conformal D3- and D5-brane probe embeddings in AdS_5 x S^5 exhibiting flows on their world-volumes. By examining the asymptotic regimes of the embeddings and the one-point function of static fields sourced by the boundary impurity, we conclude that the D5-brane embedding describes the screening of fundamental quarks in the UV into an antisymmetric source in the IR, whilst the non-conformal, D3-brane solution interpolates between the symmetric representation in the UV and fundamental sources in the IR. The D5-brane embeddings exhibit nontrivial thermodynamics with multiple branches of solutions, whilst the thermal analogue of the interpolating D3-brane solution does not appear to exist.