Holographic dual of hot Polchinski-Strassler quark-gluon plasma

TL;DR

This paper constructs a supergravity dual for hot, mass-deformed ${ m N}=4$ SYM, revealing a phase transition at half the mass of chiral multiplets, with results that can be tested via lattice super-QCD simulations.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed holographic model of hot ${ m N}=1^*$ plasma with a numerically determined ten-dimensional dual and predicts a measurable phase transition ratio.

Findings

Identified a phase transition at $m_c/T \approx 2.15$.

Constructed the full ten-dimensional supergravity dual numerically.

Established the equivalence of five- and ten-dimensional solutions in this context.

Abstract

We construct the supergravity dual of the hot quark-gluon plasma in the mass-deformed ${\cal N}=4$ Super-Yang-Mills theory (also known as ${\cal N}=1^*$). The full ten-dimensional type IIB holographic dual is described by 20 functions of two variables, which we determine numerically, and it contains a black hole with $S^5$ horizon topology. As we lower the temperature to around half of the mass of the chiral multiplets, we find evidence for (most likely a first-order) phase transition, which could lead either to one of the Polchinski-Strassler confining, screening, or oblique vacua with polarized branes, or to an intermediate phase corresponding to blackened polarized branes with an $S^2 \times S^3$ horizon topology. This phase transition is a feature that could in principle be seen by putting the theory on the lattice, and thus our result for the ratio of the chiral multiplet mass to the phase transition temperature, $m_c/T = 2.15467491205(6)$, constitutes the first prediction of string theory and AdS/CFT that could be independently checked via four-dimensional super-QCD lattice computation. We also construct the black-hole solution in certain five-dimensional gauged supergravity truncations and, without directly using uplift/reduction formulae, we find strong evidence that the five- and ten-dimensional solutions are the same. This indicates that five-dimensional gauged supergravity is powerful enough to capture the physics of the high-temperature deconfined phase of the Polchinski-Strassler quark-gluon plasma.