We study the chiral phase transition in a magnetic field at finite temperature and chemical potential within the Sakai-Sugimoto model, a holographic top-down approach to (large-N_c) QCD. We consider the limit of a small separation of the flavor D8-branes, which corresponds to a dual field theory comparable to a Nambu-Jona Lasinio (NJL) model. Mapping out the surface of the chiral phase transition in the parameter space of magnetic field strength, quark chemical potential, and temperature, we find that for small temperatures the addition of a magnetic field decreases the critical chemical potential for chiral symmetry restoration - in contrast to the case of vanishing chemical potential where, in accordance with the familiar phenomenon of magnetic catalysis, the magnetic field favors the chirally broken phase. This "inverse magnetic catalysis" (IMC) appears to be associated with a previously found magnetic phase transition within the chirally symmetric phase that shows an intriguing similarity to a transition into the lowest Landau level. We estimate IMC to persist up to 10^{19} G at low temperatures.Comment: 42 pages, 11 figures, v3: extended discussion; new appendix D; references added; version to appear in JHE

Abstract.In the presence of a chemical potential, the effect of a magnetic field on chiral symmetry breaking goes beyond the well-known magnetic catalysis. Due to a subtle interplay with the chemical potential, the magnetic field may work not only in favor but also against the chirally broken phase. At sufficiently large coupling, the magnetic field favors the broken phase only for field strengths beyond any conceivable value in nature. Therefore, in the interior of magnetars, a possible transition from chirally broken hadronic matter to chirally symmetric quark matter might occur at smaller densities than previously thought.

We investigate the surface of the chiral phase transition in the threedimensional parameter space of temperature, baryon chemical potential and magnetic field in two different approaches, the field-theoretical Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model and the holographic Sakai-Sugimoto model. The latter is a top-down approach to a gravity dual of QCD with an asymptotically large number of colors and becomes, in a certain limit, dual to an NJL-like model. Our main observation is that, at nonzero chemical potential, a magnetic field can restore chiral symmetry, in apparent contrast to the phenomenon of magnetic catalysis. This "inverse magnetic catalysis" occurs in the Sakai-Sugimoto model and, for sufficiently large coupling, in the NJL model and is related to the physics of the lowest Landau level. While in most parts our discussion is a pedagogical review of previously published results, we include new analytical results for the NJL approach and a thorough comparison of inverse magnetic catalysis in the two approaches.

A strong magnetic field enhances the chiral condensate at low temperatures. This so-called magnetic catalysis thus seeks to increase the vacuum mass of nucleons. We employ two relativistic field-theoretical models for nuclear matter, the Walecka model and an extended linear sigma model, to discuss the resulting effect on the transition between vacuum and nuclear matter at zero temperature. In both models we find that the creation of nuclear matter in a sufficiently strong magnetic field becomes energetically more costly due to the heaviness of magnetized nucleons, even though it is also found that nuclear matter is more strongly bound in a magnetic field. Our results are potentially important for dense nuclear matter in compact stars, especially since previous studies in the astrophysical context have always ignored the contribution of the magnetized Dirac sea and thus the effect of magnetic catalysis.

We present an extended version of a recently proposed semi-holographic model for heavy-ion collisions, which includes self-consistent couplings between the Yang-Mills fields of the Color Glass Condensate framework and an infrared AdS/CFT sector, such as to guarantee the existence of a conserved energy-momentum tensor for the combined system that is local in space and time, which we also construct explicitly. Moreover, we include a coupling of the topological charge density in the glasma to the same of the holographic infrared CFT. The semi-holographic approach makes it possible to combine CGC initial conditions and weak-coupling glasma field equations with a simultaneous evolution of a strongly coupled infrared sector describing the soft gluons radiated by hard partons. As a first numerical test of the semi-holographic model we study the dynamics of fluctuating homogeneous color-spin-locked Yang-Mills fields when coupled to a homogeneous and isotropic energy-momentum tensor of the holographic IR-CFT, and we find rapid convergence of the iterative numerical procedure suggested earlier.