English

Melting holographic mesons by applying a magnetic field

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-07-10 v2

Abstract

In the present letter we use holographic methods to show that a very intense magnetic field lowers the temperature at which the mesons melt and decreases the mass gap of the spectrum along with their masses. Consequently, there is a range of temperatures for which mesons can be melted by applying a magnetic field instead of increasing the temperature. We term this effect Magnetic Meson Melting (MMM), and we are able to observe it by constructing a configuration that makes it possible to apply gauge/gravity methods to study fundamental degrees of freedom in a quark-gluon plasma subject to a magnetic field as intense as that expected in high energy collisions. This is achieved by the confection of a ten-dimensional background that is dual to the magnetized plasma and nonetheless permits the embedding of D7-branes in it. For such a background to exist, a scalar field has to be present and hence a scalar operator of dimension 2 appears in the gauge theory. We present here the details of the background and of the embedding of flavor D7-branes in it. Since our results are obtained from the gravity dual of the gauge theory, the analysis is also interesting from the gravitational perspective.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.05976,
  title  = {Melting holographic mesons by applying a magnetic field},
  author = {Daniel Ávila and Leonardo Patiño},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.05976},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures. Title changed, abstract, introduction and discussion were rephrased to emphasize the physical phenomena. Plots were remade at fixed temperature in order to better display the magnetic meson melting. References added, typos corrected