Chiral Symmetry Breaking and Pions in Non-Supersymmetric Gauge/Gravity Duals

TL;DR

This paper investigates gravity duals of non-supersymmetric gauge theories with fundamental matter, revealing chiral symmetry breaking and meson spectra through D7-brane probes in deformed AdS backgrounds, and explores phase transitions related to quark mass.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of D7-brane embeddings in non-supersymmetric backgrounds, demonstrating chiral symmetry breaking and phase transitions in gauge/gravity duality.

Findings

Chiral symmetry breaking condensate found in Constable-Myers background.

Quark condensate develops only at non-zero quark mass in AdS-Schwarzschild background.

Evidence of a third order phase transition at a critical quark mass.

Abstract

We study gravity duals of large N non-supersymmetric gauge theories with matter in the fundamental representation by introducing a D7-brane probe into deformed AdS backgrounds. In particular, we consider a D7-brane probe in both the AdS Schwarzschild black hole solution and in the background found by Constable and Myers, which involves a non-constant dilaton and S^5 radius. Both these backgrounds exhibit confinement of fundamental matter and a discrete glueball and meson spectrum. We numerically compute the quark condensate and meson spectrum associated with these backgrounds. In the AdS-black hole background, a quark-bilinear condensate develops only at non-zero quark mass. We speculate on the existence of a third order phase transition at a critical quark mass where the D7 embedding undergoes a geometric transition. In the Constable-Myers background, we find a chiral symmetry breaking condensate as well as the associated Goldstone boson in the limit of small quark mass. The existence of the condensate ensures that the D7-brane never reaches the naked singularity at the origin of the deformed AdS space.