No Arabic abstract
V-QCD is a class of effective holographic models for QCD which fully includes the backreaction of quarks to gluon dynamics. The physics of the theta-angle and the axial anomaly can be consistently included in these models. We analyze their phase diagrams over ranges of values of the quark mass, N_f/N_c, and theta, computing observables such as the topological susceptibility and the meson masses. At small quark mass, where effective chiral Lagrangians are reliable, they agree with the predictions of V-QCD.
We study the effects of the CP-breaking topological $theta$-term in the large $N_c$ QCD model by Witten, Sakai and Sugimoto with $N_f$ degenerate light flavors. We first compute the ground state energy density, the topological susceptibility and the masses of the lowest lying mesons, finding agreement with expectations from the QCD chiral effective action. Then, focusing on the $N_f=2$ case, we consider the baryonic sector and determine, to leading order in the small $theta$ regime, the related holographic instantonic soliton solutions. We find that while the baryon spectrum does not receive ${cal O}(theta)$ corrections, this is not the case for observables like the electromagnetic form factor of the nucleons. In particular, it exhibits a dipole term, which turns out to be vector-meson dominated. The resulting neutron electric dipole moment, which is exactly the opposite as that of the proton, is of the same order of magnitude of previous estimates in the literature. Finally, we compute the CP-violating pion-nucleon coupling constant ${bar g}_{pi N N}$, finding that it is zero to leading order in the large $N_c$ limit.
We study the physics with finite nuclear density in the framework of AdS/QCD with holographic baryon field included. Based on a mean field type approach, we introduce the nucleon density as a bi-fermion condensate of the lowest mode of the baryon field and calculate the density dependence of the chiral condensate and the nucleon mass. We observe that the chiral condensate as well as the mass of nucleon decrease with increasing nuclear density. We also consider the mass splitting of charged vector mesons in iso-spin asymmetric nuclear matter.
We study the nuclear symmetry energy of dense matter using holographic QCD. To this end, we consider two flavor branes with equal quark masses in a D4/D6/D6 model. We find that at all densities the symmetry energy monotonically increases. At small densities, it exhibits a power law behavior with the density, $E_{rm sym} sim rho^{1/2}$.
In the framework of a holographic QCD approach we study an influence of matters on the deconfinement temperature, $T_c$. We first consider quark flavor number ($N_f$) dependence of $T_c$. We observe that $T_c$ decreases with $N_f$, which is consistent with a lattice QCD result. We also delve into how the quark number density $rho_q$ affects the value of $T_c$. We find that $T_c$ drops with increasing $rho_q$. In both cases, we confirm that the contributions from quarks are suppressed by $1/N_c$, as it should be, compared to the ones from a gravitational action (pure Yang-Mills).
We establish a holographic bottom-up model which covers both the baryonic and quark matter phases in cold and dense QCD. This is obtained by including the baryons using simple approximation schemes in the V-QCD model, which also includes the backreaction of the quark matter to the dynamics of pure Yang-Mills. We examine two approaches for homogeneous baryon matter: baryons as a thin layer of noninteracting matter in the holographic bulk, and baryons with a homogeneous bulk gauge field. We find that the second approach exhibits phenomenologically reasonable features. At zero temperature, the vacuum, baryon, and quark matter phases are separated by strongly first order transitions as the chemical potential varies. The equation of state in the baryonic phase is found to be stiff, i.e., the speed of sound clearly exceeds the value $c_s^2=1/3$ of conformal plasmas at high baryon densities.