Thermal Dynamics of Quarks and Mesons in N=2* Yang-Mills Theory

Abstract

We study the dynamics of quenched fundamental matter in $\mathcal{N}=2^{\ast }$ supersymmetric large $N_c$ $SU(N_c)$ Yang-Mills theory, extending our earlier work to finite temperature. We use probe D7-branes in the holographically dual thermalized generalization of the $\mathcal{N}=2^{\ast }$ Pilch-Warner gravitational background found by Buchel and Liu. Such a system provides an opportunity to study how key features of the dynamics are affected by being in a non-conformal setting where there is an intrinsic scale, set here by the mass, $m_H$, of a hypermultiplet. Such studies are motivated by connections to experimental studies of the quark-gluon plasma at RHIC and LHC, where the microscopic theory of the constituents, QCD, has a scale, ${\Lambda }_{\mathrm{QCD}}$. We show that the binding energy of mesons in the $\mathcal{N}=2^{\ast }$ theory is increased in the presence of the scale $m_H$, and that subsequently the meson-melting temperature is higher than for the conformal case.

17 pages, 6 figures

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• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• Holographic Phase Transitions with Fundamental Matter
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• Thermodynamics of the N=2^* strongly coupled plasma
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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Holographic Dual of the Eguchi-Kawai Mechanism