Fundamental Landau Levels in a Strongly Coupled Plasma

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the emergence of Landau levels in a strongly coupled plasma under magnetic fields using gauge/gravity duality, revealing magnetic catalysis and inverse catalysis effects on quasinormal modes.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic model showing Landau levels in a strongly coupled plasma with magnetic fields and analyzes their impact on meson stability.

Findings

Landau levels appear in the spectrum of a strongly coupled plasma.

Magnetic catalysis occurs at high magnetic field intensities.

Inverse magnetic catalysis is observed at lower magnetic field intensities.

Abstract

We use the gauge/gravity correspondence to show that in its context there appear Landau levels when studying the excitations of the fundamental degrees of freedom of a strongly coupled plasma subject to a magnetic field of arbitrary intensity. We work in the phase where mesons are melted by embedding a D7-brane in the 10D uplift that we construct for the 5D background associated to a magnetic brane. By studying the dependence of the lowest quasinormal frequency on both, the intensity of the magnetic field and the Landau level, we corroborate that the energy behaves as expected for dissociating Landau levels. The reconstruction of the impact of the magnetic field on the stability of the quasinormal modes allows us to identify inverse magnetic catalysis for intensities of the field bellow a certain value, and magnetic catalysis for those above it.