Related papers: From 3d dualities to hadron physics
Ideas about a duality between gauge fields and strings have been around for many decades. During the last ten years, these ideas have taken a much more concrete mathematical form. String descriptions of the strongly coupled dynamics of…
The chiral phase boundary of nuclear matter is expected to have a critical point where the rapid crossover of lattice methods at zero chemical potential becomes a first-order phase transition. Phenomenological models based on the AdS/CFT…
We investigate the phase structure of the compactified $2$-dimensional nonlinear $SU(3)/U(1)^2$ flag sigma model with respect to two $\theta$-terms. Based on the circle compactification with the ${\mathbb Z}_{3}$-twisted boundary condition,…
It is shown that permanent confinement in three-dimensional compact U(1) gauge theory can be destroyed by matter fields in a deconfinement transition. This is a consequence of a non-trivial infrared fixed point caused by matter, and an…
We consider the massive vector $N$-component $(\lambda\phi^{4})_{D}$ theory in Euclidian space and, using an extended Matsubara formalism we perform a compactification on a $d$-dimensional subspace, $d\leq D$. This allows us to treat…
I revisit the phase structure of hot and dense matter out of quarks and gluons with some historical consideration on the color deconfinement and chiral phase transitions. My goal is to make clear which part of the QCD phase diagram is under…
Current heavy-ion collision experiments might lead to the discovery of a first-order chiral symmetry breaking phase-transition line, ending in a second-order critical point. Nevertheless, the extraction of information about the equilibrium…
We investigate the properties of near-conformal dynamics in a sector of large charge when approaching the lower boundary of the conformal window from the chirally broken phase. To elucidate our approach we use the time-honored example of…
While sign-coherent 4-dimensional structures cannot dominate topological charge fluctuations in the QCD vacuum at all scales due to reflection positivity, it is possible that enhanced coherence exists over extended space-time regions of…
Continuous quantum phase transitions that are beyond the conventional paradigm of fluctuations of a symmetry breaking order parameter are challenging for theory. These phase transitions often involve emergent deconfined gauge fields at the…
We consider an SU(2) gauge theory in six-dimensions. We show that there exists non-trivial structure of gauge vacua in compactified background M4xS2. In this circumstances, there can exist a cosmic string, whose solution is recently…
Many model quantum spin systems have been proposed to realize critical points or phases described by 2+1 dimensional conformal gauge theories. On a torus of size $L$ and modular parameter $\tau$, the energy levels of such gauge theories…
I describe recent examples of phase transitions in four-dimensional M theory vacua in which the net generation number changes. There are naive obstructions to transitions lifting chiral matter, but loopholes exist which enable us to avoid…
Duality groups of Abelian gauge theories on four manifolds and their reduction to two dimensions are considered. The duality groups include elements that relate different space-times in addition to relating different gauge-coupling…
We investigate the transition between the phases $B$ and $C_b$ observed in four-dimensional Causal Dynamical Triangulations (CDT). We find that the critical properties of CDT with toroidal spatial topology are the same as earlier observed…
We have studied the chiral phase transition in three-dimensional QED in the presence of a Chern--Simons term for the gauge field. There exists a phase where the chiral symmetry is broken dynamically and we have determined the critical line…
We revisit the holographic description of the thermal first order phase transition of N=4 SYM compactified on a spatial circle. At the transition, the dominant bulk saddle exchanges between a geometry with a compact spatial circle and one…
We develop a description of the equation of state of QCD matter with restored chiral symmetry, which is in thermal and chemical equilibrium with the hadronic phase. The hadron gas is described with thermodynamically consistent volume…
In 6D orbifold compactifications of N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories, the one-loop behaviour of the 4D {\it effective} gauge coupling and of its beta function are carefully investigated for momentum scales k^2 near the compactification…
We consider M-theory on compact spaces of G_2 holonomy constructed as orbifolds of the form (CY x S^1)/Z_2 with fixed point set \Sigma on the CY. This describes N=1 SU(2) gauge theories with b_1(\Sigma) chiral multiplets in the adjoint. For…