We study the holographic light meson spectra and their mass splitting in the nuclear medium. In order to describe the nuclear matter, we take into account the thermal charged AdS geometry with two flavor charges, which can be reinterpreted as the num
ber densities of proton and neutron after some field redefinitions. We show that the meson mass splitting occurs when there exists the density difference between proton and neutron. Depending on the flavor charge, the mass of the positively (negatively) charged meson increases (decreases) as the density difference increases, whereas the neutral meson mass is independent of the density difference. In the regime of the large nucleon density with a relatively large number difference between proton and neutron, we find that negatively charged pion becomes massless in the nuclear medium, so the pion condensate can occur. We also investigate the binding energy of a heavy quarkonium in the nuclear medium, in which the binding energy of a heavy quarkonium becomes weaker as the density difference increases.
By using the gauge/gravity duality, we investigate the dual field theories of the anisotropic backgrounds, which are exact solutions of Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theory with a Liouville potential. When we turn on the bulk gauge field fluctuation $A_x$
with a non-trivial dilaton coupling, the AC conductivity of this dual field theory is proportional to the frequency with an exponent depending on parameters of the anisotropic background. In some parameter regions, we find that this conductivity can have the negative exponent like the strange metal. In addition, we also investigate another U(1) gauge field fluctuation, which is not coupled with a dilaton field. We classify all possible conductivities of this system and find that the exponent of the conductivity is always positive.
We investigate the interaction between flat membrane and point-like graviton in the plane-wave matrix model. The one-loop effective potential in the large distance limit is computed and is shown to be of r^{-3} type where r is the distance between tw
o objects. This type of interaction has been interpreted as the one incorporating the smearing effect due to the configuration of flat membrane in plane-wave background. Our result supports this interpretation and provides one more evidence about it.
We find an exact coordinate transformation rule from the $AdS_5$ Schwarzschild black hole in the Poincare and the global patch to the Fefferman-Graham coordinate system. Using these results, we evaluate the corresponding holographic stress tensor and
trace anomaly of the boundary theory as a function of the radial coordinate. Following the AdS/CFT correspondence, we reinterpret the radial coordinate dependence of the trace anomaly as the Wilsonian renormalization group(RG) flow of the boundary theory.
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 consisten
t 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).
