Strongly-coupled anisotropic gauge theories and holography

TL;DR

This paper explores non-perturbative anisotropic gauge theories using holography, revealing how anisotropy affects phase transitions, transport, and chaos, with implications for understanding strongly coupled systems.

Contribution

It generalizes the holographic c-theorem to anisotropic cases and studies the effects of anisotropy on phase transitions and chaos in gauge theories.

Findings

Anisotropic deformation lowers the confinement-deconfinement transition temperature.

The butterfly velocity in the IR can exceed the conformal bound.

Anisotropy influences transport and diffusion properties significantly.

Abstract

We initiate a non-perturbative study of anisotropic, non-conformal and confining gauge theories that are holographically realized in gravity by generic Einstein-Axion-Dilaton systems. In the vacuum our solutions describe RG flows from a conformal field theory in the UV to generic scaling solutions in the IR with generic hyperscaling violation and dynamical exponents $\theta$ and $z$. We formulate a generalization of the holographic c-theorem to the anisotropic case. At finite temperature, we discover that the anisotropic deformation reduces the confinement-deconfinement phase transition temperature suggesting a possible alternative explanation of inverse magnetic catalysis solely based on anisotropy. We also study transport and diffusion properties in anisotropic theories and observe in particular that the butterfly velocity that characterizes both diffusion and growth of chaos transverse to the anisotropic direction, saturates a constant value in the IR which can exceed the bound given by the conformal value.