We provide a first-principle construction of baryons as quantum Hall droplets in single-flavor holographic QCD. The baryons are described as charged D6-branes with a circular boundary on a flavor D8-brane in the Type IIA backgrounds dual to the confining and non-confining phases. The holographic description allows us to calculate precisely their properties, such as mass and size. We also consider other objects with baryonic charge, such as vortons, domain walls with holes, and "sandwich vortons", and discuss the relative (meta)stability of all these configurations.

Using the string/field theory correspondence as a tool, we study the dependence of the Hagedorn temperature of strongly coupled, planar gauge theories on angular velocities and chemical potentials for U(1) global currents. Our results are obtained from an interplay of world-sheet semiclassical quantization methods and target space low energy effective ones. The Hagedorn temperature is given as an expansion in the inverse (large) 't Hooft coupling limit. Working to quadratic order in the fluctuations, the world-sheet analysis provides the leading, the next-to-leading and part of the next-to-next-to leading order terms. In particular, it captures the NNLO log 2 terms which are due to the contributions of non-zero modes to the zero-point energy. These modes are not accounted for by the effective approach, within which they have to be included by hand using suitable educated guesses. On the other hand, the effective methods allow to compute in a relatively easy way the missing NNLO pieces (and even further subleading corrections), which could be accounted for from the world-sheet approach only working at quartic (or higher) order in the fluctuations. We present general results and several examples in various dimensions, including both confining models and conformal field theories on spheres (such as 𝒩=4 SYM and ABJM) dual to string theories on global AdS spaces.

We study the Hagedorn temperature TH of strongly coupled quantum field theories admitting a holographic string or M-theory description in various regimes and scenarios. In the first part of the paper we propose a "thermal scalar" effective approach to the calculation of TH in eleven-dimensional supergravity. The proposal allows us to extend the existing results for TH to the strongly coupled string regime, i.e. to a previously unexplored regime of field theory parameters where the number of colors N is smaller than (some power of) the 't Hooft coupling 2. We can thus extend the existing results for the a' expansion of the Aharony-Bergman-Jafferis-Maldacena model, which have a spectacular agreement with predictions from integrability, in a different direction in parameter space. In particular, we explicate the first nonperturbative corrections. We also apply the formalism to the Witten-Yang-Mills model, finding that the result for the ratio of TH with the deconfinement temperature is in the same ballpark of the lattice one for pure YangMills. Within the same model, we study the dependence of the Hagedorn temperature on the 8-angle. In the second part of the paper we analyze the effect of dynamical flavors on TH in confining theories. By studying the few available examples of regular backgrounds dual to confining theories with flavors, we find that generally the effects of flavors is to reduce the value of TH in units of the square root of the confining string tension. The effect turns out to be milder than the analogous reduction of the critical temperature for deconfinement when the latter is known.

This work investigates cosmic topological defects in gauge theories, focusing on models with an SU(N) gauge group coupled with a single flavor, explored through a holographic framework. At low energies, the effective theory is described by an axion-like particle resulting from the spontaneous breaking of the axial U(1)_A flavor symmetry. As the Universe cools below a critical temperature, the chiral symmetry is broken, and non-trivial vacuum configurations form, resulting in the creation of cosmic strings and domain walls. We provide a UV description of these defects in a particular holographic theory, the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model, as probe D6-branes. We show the presence of a first-order phase transition separating string loop from domain wall solutions. String loops charged under the baryon symmetry and with angular momentum - vortons - can be understood as excitations of a topological phase of matter given by a Chern-Simons theory living on the D6-brane world volume. Finally, we provide an effective description of string loops and vortons in terms of degrees of freedom living on the flavor brane, i.e. mesonic modes.

Abstract We provide general results on the Hagedorn temperature of planar, strongly coupled confining gauge theories holographically dual to type II superstring models on curved backgrounds with Ramond-Ramond and Kalb-Ramond fluxes and non-trivial dilaton. For exact backgrounds the Hagedorn temperature is determined up to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (NNNLO) in an expansion in α′; in all the other cases the results can be safely trusted up to NNLO. To reach these goals we exploit two complementary approaches. On the one hand, we perform an extrapolation to the Hagedorn regime of world-sheet results obtained from the semiclassical quantization of string configurations winding around the compact Euclidean time direction. En passant, we provide a detailed derivation of the fermionic part of the world-sheet spectrum, which is hard to find in the literature. On the other hand, we perturbatively solve the equations of motion for the thermal scalar field corresponding to the lightest mode of the winding string, which in flat space becomes tachyonic above the Hagedorn temperature. The interplay between different approaches is surely convenient, but we provide insights about a possible derivation of the whole NNLO correction to the Hagedorn temperature from a pure world-sheet perspective; furthermore, we determine the effective mass of the thermal scalar from the world-sheet in full generality.

In single-flavored large N QCD, the standard low-energy description of baryons in terms of Skyrmions is no longer available. Recently it has been proposed that the correct low-energy description in this case is in terms of a pancake-shaped sheet, a quantum Hall droplet. We will describe how this proposal can be made concrete in Holographic QCD.We present the brane configuration describing the sheet and an approximate solution with the expected physical properties.

We provide a short overview on recent results on the Hagedorn temperature of confining gauge theories having a dual holographic string description.

When axionic strings carry a global charge, domain walls bounded by such strings may not be allowed to decay completely. This happens in particular in some models where a composite axion-like particle is the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson of chiral symmetry breaking of an extra quark flavor. In this case the global symmetry is the extra flavor baryonic symmetry. The corresponding axionic domain walls can carry a baryonic charge: they represent the low energy description of the baryons made by the extra quark flavor. Basic properties of these particles, such as spin, mass scale, size are discussed. The corresponding charged axionic strings are explicitly constructed and studied in a specific calculable model.

We propose a general formula for higher order corrections to the value of the Hagedorn temperature of a class of holographic confining gauge theories in the strong coupling expansion. Inspired by recent proposals in the literature, the formula combines the sigma-model string expansion with an effective approach. In particular, it includes the sigma-model contributions to the Hagedorn temperature at next-to-next-to leading order, which are computed in full generality. For 𝒩 = 4 SYM on S3 our result agrees with numerical estimates with excellent precision. We use the general formula to predict the value of the Hagedorn temperature for ABJM on S2 and for the dual of purely RR global AdS3.

In single-flavor QCD, the low energy description of baryons as Skyrmions is not available. In this case, it has been proposed by Komargodski that baryons can be viewed as kinds of charged quantum Hall droplets, or “sheets”. In this paper we propose a string theory description of the sheets in single-flavor holographic QCD, focusing on the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model. The sheets have a “hard” gluonic core, described by D6-branes, and a “soft” mesonic shell, dual to non-trivial D8-brane gauge field configurations. We first provide the description of an infinitely extended sheet with massless or moderately massive quarks. Then, we construct a semi-infinite sheet ending on a one-dimensional boundary, a “vortex string”. The holographic description allows for the precise calculation of sheet observables. In particular, we compute the tension and thickness of the sheet and the vortex string, and provide their four dimensional effective actions.

A bstract The divergence of the string partition function due to the exponential growth of states is a well-understood issue in flat spacetime. It can be interpreted as the appearance of tachyon modes above a certain temperature, known as the Hagedorn temperature T H . In the literature, one can find some intuitions about its generalization to curved spacetimes, where computations are extremely hard and explicit results cannot be provided in general. In this paper, we present a genus-zero estimate of T H , at leading order in α ′, for string theories on curved backgrounds holographically dual to confining gauge theories. This is a particularly interesting case, since the holographic correspondence equates T H with the Hagedorn temperature of the dual gauge theories. For concreteness we focus on Type IIA string theory on a well known background dual to an SU( N ) Yang-Mills theory. The resulting Hagedorn temperature turns out to be proportional to the square root of the Yang-Mills confining string tension. The related coefficient, which at leading order is analytically determined, is the same as the one for Type II theories in flat space. While the calculation is performed in a specific model, the result applies in full generality to confining gauge theories with a top-down holographic dual.

Spectra of stochastic gravitational waves (GW) generated in cosmological first-order phase transitions are computed within strongly correlated theories with a dual holographic description. The theories are mostly used as models of dark sectors. In particular, we consider the so-called Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model, a $SU(N)$ gauge theory coupled to different matter fields in both the fundamental and the adjoint representations. The model has a well-known top-down holographic dual description which allows us to perform reliable calculations in the strongly coupled regime. We consider the GW spectra from bubble collisions and sound waves arising from two different kinds of first-order phase transitions: a confinement/deconfinement one and a chiral symmetry breaking/restoration one. Depending on the model parameters, we find that the GW spectra may fall within the sensibility region of ground-based and space-based interferometers, as well as of Pulsar Timing Arrays. In the latter case, the signal could be compatible with the recent potential observation by NANOGrav. When the two phase transitions happen at different critical temperatures, characteristic spectra with double frequency peaks show up. Moreover, in this case we explicitly show how to correct the redshift factors appearing in the formulae for the GW power spectra to account for the fact that adiabatic expansion from the first transition to the present times cannot be assumed anymore.

A bstract Using the holographic correspondence as a tool, we determine the steady-state velocity of expanding vacuum bubbles nucleated within chiral finite temperature first-order phase transitions occurring in strongly coupled large N QCD-like models. We provide general formulae for the friction force exerted by the plasma on the bubbles and for the steady-state velocity. In the top-down holographic description, the phase transitions are related to changes in the embedding of $$ Dq\hbox{-} \overline{D}q $$ Dq ‐ D ¯ q flavor branes probing the black hole background sourced by a stack of N Dp -branes. We first consider the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto $$ D4\hbox{-} D8\hbox{-} \overline{D}8 $$ D 4 ‐ D 8 ‐ D ¯ 8 setup, compute the friction force and deduce the equilibrium velocity. Then we extend our analysis to more general setups and to different dimensions. Finally, we briefly compare our results, obtained within a fully non-perturbative framework, to other estimates of the bubble velocity in the literature.

The effects of a boundary on the circuit complexity are studied in two dimensional theories. The analysis is performed in the holographic realization of a conformal field theory with a boundary by employing different proposals for the dual of the complexity, including the “Complexity = Volume” (CV) and “Complexity = Action” (CA) prescriptions, and in the harmonic chain with Dirichlet boundary conditions. In all the cases considered except for CA, the boundary introduces a subleading logarithmic divergence in the expansion of the complexity as the UV cutoff vanishes. Holographic subregion complexity is also explored in the CV case, finding that it can change discontinuously under continuous variations of the configuration of the subregion.

A bstract Using the holographic correspondence as a tool, we study the dynamics of first-order phase transitions in strongly coupled gauge theories at finite temperature. Considering an evolution from the large to the small temperature phase, we compute the nucleation rate of bubbles of true vacuum in the metastable phase. For this purpose, we find the relevant configurations (bounces) interpolating between the vacua and we compute the related effective actions. We start by revisiting the compact Randall-Sundrum model at high temperature. Using holographic renormalization, we compute the derivative term in the effective bounce action, that was missing in the literature. Then, we address the full problem within the top-down Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model. It displays both a confinement/deconfinement and a chiral symmetry breaking/restoration phase transition which, depending on the model parameters, can happen at different critical temperatures. For the confinement/deconfinement case we perform the numerical analysis of an effective description of the transition and also provide analytic expressions using thick and thin wall approximations. For the chiral symmetry transition, we implement a variational approach that allows us to address the challenging non-linear problem stemming from the Dirac-Born-Infeld action.

Massive QCD at θ = π breaks CP spontaneously and admits domain walls whose dynamics and phases depend on the number of flavors and their masses. We discuss these issues within the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model of holographic QCD. Besides showing that this model reproduces all QCD expectations, we address two interesting claims in the literature. The first is about the possibility that the QCD domain-wall theory is fully captured by three-dimensional physics, only. The second regards the existence of quantum phases in certain Chern-Simons theories coupled to fundamental matter. Both claims are supported by the string theory construction.

We prove the universality of the Chern-Simons diffusion rate-a crucial observable for the chiral magnetic effect-in a large class of planar strongly correlated gauge theories with dual string description. When the effects of anomalies are suppressed, the diffusion rate is simply given in terms of temperature, entropy density and gauge coupling, with a universal numerical coefficient. We show that this result holds, in fact, for all the top-down holographic models where the calculation has been performed in the past, even in the presence of magnetic fields and anisotropy. We also extend the check to further well-known models for which the same computation was lacking. Finally we point out some subtleties related to the definition of the Chern-Simons diffusion rate in the presence of anomalies. In this case, the usual definition of the rate-a late time limit of the imaginary part of the retarded correlator of the topological charge density-would give an exactly vanishing result, due to its relation with a nonconserved charge correlator. We confirm this observation by explicit holographic computations on generic isotropic black hole backgrounds. Nevertheless, a nontrivial Chern-Simons relaxation time can in principle be extracted from a quasinormal mode calculation.

We study the effects of the CP-breaking topological θ-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 θ regime, the related holographic instantonic soliton solutions. We find that while the baryon spectrum does not receive \( \mathcal{O}\left(\theta \right) \) 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 \( {\overline{g}}_{\pi N\;N} \), finding that it is zero to leading order in the large N c limit.

We compute the electric dipole moment of nucleons in the large N_{c} QCD model by Witten, Sakai, and Sugimoto with N_{f}=2 degenerate massive flavors. Baryons in the model are instantonic solitons of an effective five-dimensional action describing the whole tower of mesonic fields. We find that the dipole electromagnetic form factor of the nucleons, induced by a finite topological θ angle, exhibits complete vector meson dominance. We are able to evaluate the contribution of each vector meson to the final result-a small number of modes are relevant to obtain an accurate estimate. Extrapolating the model parameters to real QCD data, the neutron electric dipole moment is evaluated to be d_{n}=1.8×10^{-16}θ e cm. The electric dipole moment of the proton is exactly the opposite.

In this contribution we review how holographic tools can be used to study the dependence on the CP-breaking θ parameter of various observables in a large Nc Yang-Mills model. Relevant examples are the ground-state energy density, the string tension, the glueball mass spectrum and the critical temperature for deconfinement. These observables have been also studied, in the small θ regime and up to very few powers of θ2, in pure Yang-Mills on the Lattice. The holographic results qualitatively agree with available Lattice data and, being exact in θ, provide benchmarks for higher order corrections.