We revisit the analysis of the drag a massive quark experiences and the wake it creates at a temperature T while moving through a plasma using a gravity dual that captures the renormalisation group runnings in the dual gauge theory. Our gravity dual has a black hole and seven branes embedded via Ouyang embedding, but the geometry is a deformation of the usual conifold metric. In particular the gravity dual has squashed two spheres, and a small resolution at the IR. Using this background we show that the drag of a massive quark receives corrections that are proportional to powers of log T when compared with the drag computed using AdS/QCD correspondence. The massive quarks map to fundamental strings in the dual gravity theory. We use the perturbation produced by these strings to compute the wake and compare with the results obtained using AdS/QCD correspondence. We also study the shear viscosity in the theory with running couplings, analyze the viscosity to entropy ratio and compare the result with the bound derived from AdS backgrounds. In the presence of higher order curvature square corrections from the back-reactions of the embedded D7 branes, we argue the possibility of the entropy to viscosity bound being violated. Finally, we show that our set-up could in-principle allow us to study a family of gauge theories at the boundary by cutting off the dual geometry respectively at various points in the radial direction. All these gauge theories can have well defined UV completions, and more interestingly, we demonstrate that any thermodynamical quantities derived from these theories would be completely independent of the cut-off scale and only depend on the temperature at which we define these theories. Such a result would justify the holographic renormalisabilities of these theories which we, in turn, also demonstrate. We give physical interpretations of these results and compare them with more realistic scenarios.

We continue our study on the gravity duals for strongly coupled large N QCD with fundamental flavors both at zero and nonzero temperatures. The gravity dual at zero temperature captures the logarithmic runnings of the coupling constants at far IR and the almost conformal, albeit strongly coupled, behavior at the UV. The full UV completion of gauge theory is accomplished in the gravity side by attaching an antide Sitter cap to the IR geometry described in our previous work. Attaching such an anti-de Sitter cap is highly nontrivial because it amounts to finding the right interpolating geometry and sources that take us from a gravity solution with nonzero three-form fluxes to another one that has almost vanishing three-form fluxes. In this paper we give a concrete realization of such a scenario, completing the program advocated in our earlier paper. One of the main advantages of having such a background, in addition to providing a dual description of the required gauge theory, is the absence of Landau poles and consequently the UV divergences of the Wilson loops. The potential for the heaviest fundamental quark-antiquark pairs, which are like the heavy quarkonium states in realistic QCD, can be computed and their linear behavior at large separations and zero temperature could be demonstrated. At small separations the expected Coulombic behavior appears to dominate. On the other hand, at nonzero temperatures interesting properties like heavy quarkonium-type suppressions and melting are shown to emerge from our gravity dual. We provide some discussions of the melting temperature and compare our results with the charmonium spectrum and lattice simulations. We argue that, in spite of the large N nature of our construction, certain modelindependent predictions can be made.

Abstract:We revisit the classical theory of ten-dimensional two-derivative gravity coupled to fluxes, scalar fields, D-branes, anti D-branes and Orientifold-planes. We show that such set-ups do not give rise to a four-dimensional positive curvature spacetime with the isometries of de Sitter spacetime. We further argue that a de Sitter solution in type IIB theory may still be achieved if the higher-order curvature corrections are carefully controlled. Our analysis relies on the derivation of the de Sitter condition from an explicit background solution by going beyond the supergravity limit of type IIB theory. As such this also tells us how the background supersymmetry should be broken and under what conditions D-term uplifting can be realized with non self-dual fluxes.

Non-extremal solution with warped resolved-deformed conifold background is important to study the infrared limit of large N thermal QCD. Earlier works in this direction have not taken into account all the back-reactions on the geometry, namely from the branes, fluxes, and black-hole carefully. In the present work we make some progress in this direction by solving explicitly the supergravity equations of motions in the presence of the backreaction from the black-hole. The backreactions from the branes and the fluxes on the other hand and to the order that we study, are comparatively suppressed. Our analysis reveal, among other things, how the resolution parameter would depend on the horizon radius and how the RG flows of the coupling constants should be understood in these scenarios, including their effects on the background three-form fluxes. We also study the effect of switching on a chemical potential in the background and, in a particularly simplified scenario, compute the actual value of the chemical potential for our case.

A consistency check for any UV complete model for large N QCD should be, among other things, the existence of a well-defined vector and scalar mesonic spectra. In this paper, we use our UV complete model in type IIB string theory to study the IR dynamics and use this to predict the mesonic spectra in the dual type IIA side. The advantage of this approach is two-fold: not only will this justify the consistency of the supergravity approach, but it will also give us a way to compare the IR spectra and the model with the ones proposed earlier by Sakai and Sugimoto. Interestingly, the spectra coming from the massless stringy sector are independent of the UV physics, although the massive string sector may pose certain subtleties regarding the UV contributions as well as the mappings to actual QCD. Additionally, we find that a component of the string landscape enters the picture: there are points in the landscape where the spectra can be improved somewhat over the existing results in the literature. These points in the landscape in-turn also determine certain background supergravity components and fix various pathologies that eventually lead to a consistent low energy description of the theory.