Mesons in gauge/gravity dual with large number of fundamental fields

TL;DR

This paper develops a gravity dual description of mesons in a three-dimensional super Yang-Mills theory with fundamental matter, going beyond the probe approximation by considering fully backreacted brane solutions.

Contribution

It establishes the gravity dual for mesons in a 3D super Yang-Mills theory with fundamental matter, including backreaction effects, and computes the meson mass spectrum.

Findings

Mesons are dual to low-energy closed string states.

The lowest-lying meson mass depends linearly on the quark mass.

The work extends gauge/gravity duality to include backreacted flavor fields.

Abstract

In view of extending gauge/gravity dualities with flavour beyond the probe approximation, we establish the gravity dual description of mesons for a three-dimensional super Yang-Mills theory with fundamental matter. For this purpose we consider the fully backreacted D2/D6 brane solution of Cherkis and Hashimoto in an approximation due to Pelc and Siebelink. The low-energy field theory is the IR fixed point theory of three-dimensional N=4 SU(N_c) super Yang-Mills with N_f fundamental fields, which we consider in a large N_c and N_f limit with N_f/N_c finite and fixed. We discuss the dictionary between meson-like operators and supergravity fluctuations in the corresponding near-horizon geometry. In particular, we find that the mesons are dual to the low-energy limit of closed string states. In analogy to computations of glueball mass spectra, we calculate the mass of the lowest-lying meson and find that it depends linearly on the quark mass.