Broadening of the QCD3 flux tube from the AdS/CFT correspondence

TL;DR

Using the AdS/CFT correspondence at finite temperature, the paper demonstrates that the QCD3 flux tube exhibits logarithmic broadening with quark separation, differing from lattice QCD predictions and suggesting potential for extrapolation across coupling regimes.

Contribution

The study provides the first numerical evidence of logarithmic flux tube broadening in QCD3 via AdS/CFT at finite temperature, highlighting differences from lattice QCD and implications for strong-weak coupling extrapolation.

Findings

Logarithmic broadening of the flux tube at finite temperature

Absence of broadening in the zero-temperature non-confining limit

No roughening transition in the AdS/CFT formulation

Abstract

We use the finite temperature AdS/CFT approach to demonstrate logarithmic broadening of the confining QCD3 flux tube as a function of quark separation. This behavior indicates that, unlike lattice QCD, there is no roughening transition in the AdS/CFT formulation, which raises the interesting possibility of extrapolating strong coupling results to weak couplings by the use of resummation techniques. In the zero-temperature non-confining limit, we find that this logarithmic broadening of the field strength distribution is absent. Our results are obtained numerically at strong couplings, in the supergravity approximation.