Holographic flows and thermodynamics of Polyakov loop impurities

Abstract

We study holographic probes dual to heavy quark impurities interpolating between fundamental and symmetric/antisymmetric tensor representations in strongly coupled N=4 supersymmetric gauge theory. These correspond to non-conformal D3- and D5-brane probe embeddings in AdS_5 x S^5 exhibiting flows on their world-volumes. By examining the asymptotic regimes of the embeddings and the one-point function of static fields sourced by the boundary impurity, we conclude that the D5-brane embedding describes the screening of fundamental quarks in the UV into an antisymmetric source in the IR, whilst the non-conformal, D3-brane solution interpolates between the symmetric representation in the UV and fundamental sources in the IR. The D5-brane embeddings exhibit nontrivial thermodynamics with multiple branches of solutions, whilst the thermal analogue of the interpolating D3-brane solution does not appear to exist.

28 pages, 7 figures, references added, version published in JHEP

References in corpus (5)

• Holographic Wilson Loops
• Wilson Loops of Anti-symmetric Representation and D5-branes
• The g-theorem and quantum information theory
• The Spectrum of Excitations of Holographic Wilson Loops
• BPS Soliton Solutions of a D3-brane Action

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• Holographic entanglement entropy from probe M-theory branes
• Wilson Surface Central Charge from Holographic Entanglement Entropy
• Free energy and defect $C$-theorem in free scalar theory
• Free energy and defect $C$-theorem in free fermion
• Entanglement of heavy quark impurities and generalized gravitational entropy
• Holographic Entanglement Entropy of the Coulomb Branch
• Holographic Wilson Lines as Screened Impurities
• Holographic Coulomb Branch Solitons, Quasinormal Modes, and Black Holes