Holographic flavor on the Higgs branch

TL;DR

This paper explores the holographic dual of the Higgs branch in gauge theories with fundamental matter, revealing how flavor branes and flux configurations encode Higgs phase properties and analyzing meson spectra in various defect scenarios.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the holographic Higgs phase is realized through flavor brane fluxes and embeddings, providing a geometric interpretation of Higgs mechanisms in gauge/gravity duality.

Findings

Holographic duals involve flux addition and brane embedding adjustments.

Higgs phase solutions match F- and D-flatness conditions.

Defect codimension affects meson spectrum, making it continuous and gapless.

Abstract

In this paper we study the holographic dual, in several spacetime dimensions, of the Higgs branch of gauge theories with fundamental matter. These theories contain defects of various codimensionalities, where the matter fields are located. In the holographic description the matter is added by considering flavor brane probes in the supergravity backgrounds generated by color branes, while the Higgs branch is obtained when the color and flavor branes recombine with each other. We show that, generically, the holographic dual of the Higgs phase is realized by means of the addition of extra flux on the flavor branes and by choosing their appropriate embedding in the background geometry. This suggests a dielectric interpretation in terms of the color branes, whose vacuum solutions precisely match the F- and D-flatness conditions obtained on the field theory side. We further compute the meson mass spectra in several cases and show that when the defect added has codimension greater than zero it becomes continuous and gapless.