Chiral Symmetry Breaking in the AdS/CFT Correspondence

TL;DR

This paper investigates chiral symmetry breaking in a non-supersymmetric gauge theory using the AdS/CFT correspondence, revealing a nonzero pion decay constant and dynamical symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It demonstrates chiral symmetry breaking and computes related physical quantities within a holographic model derived from supergravity.

Findings

Dynamical breaking of SU(3) chiral symmetry to SO(3)

Nonzero pion decay constant, f_pi

Identification of an unstable critical point in the scalar potential

Abstract

We study the SU(3)-invariant relevant deformation of D=4 N=4 SU(N) gauge theory at large N using the AdS/CFT correspondence. At low energies, we obtain a nonsupersymmetric gauge theory with three left-handed quarks in the adjoint of SU(N). In terms of the five dimensional gauged supergravity, there is an unstable critical point in the scalar potential for fluctuations of some fields in a nontrivial representation of the symmetry group SU(3). On the field theory side, this corresponds to dynamical breaking of the SU(3) chiral symmetry down to SO(3). We compute the condensate of the quark bilinear and the two-point correlation function of the spontaneously broken currents from supergravity and find a nonzero `pion' decay constant, f_pi.