Chiral Transition of N=4 Super Yang-Mills with Flavor on a 3-Sphere

TL;DR

This paper investigates a phase transition in strongly-coupled N=4 Super-Yang-Mills theory on a 3-sphere with fundamental matter, using holography to map the transition's phase diagram and identify a first-order chiral symmetry breaking transition.

Contribution

It provides a numerical holographic analysis of the chiral transition in N=4 SYM with flavor on a 3-sphere, mapping the phase diagram and characterizing the nature of the transition.

Findings

Identified a first-order phase transition line in the mass-temperature plane.

Mapped the phase diagram showing the chiral condensate behavior.

Determined the transition occurs above the deconfinement temperature.

Abstract

We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to perform a numerical study of a phase transition in strongly-coupled large-Nc N = 4 Super-Yang-Mills theory on a 3-sphere coupled to a finite number Nf of massive N = 2 hypermultiplets in the fundamental representation of the gauge group. The gravity dual system is a number Nf of probe D7-branes embedded in AdS_5 x S^5. We draw the phase diagram for this theory in the plane of hypermultiplet mass versus temperature and identify for temperatures above the Hawking-Page deconfinement temperature a first-order phase transition line across which the chiral condensate jumps discontinuously.