Holographic Non-Abelian Flavour Symmetry Breaking

Abstract

We investigate a holographic model for both spontaneous and explicit symmetry breaking of non-abelian flavour symmetries. This consists of a bottom-up model inspired by the top-down D3/probe D7-brane model. It incorporates the running anomalous dimensions of the fields. We ensure that in the holographic bulk, the full non-abelian flavour symmetries for massless quarks are present. The quark masses are spontaneously generated field values in the bulk and there is a resultant bulk Higgs mechanism. We provide a numerical technique to find the mass eigenvalues from a system of mixed holographic fields, testing it against an analytic model of N=2 supersymmetric matter fields. We apply these ideas to two-flavour QCD with both u−d quark mass splitting and multi-trace bulk action terms that are expected to break U(Nf)V to SU(Nf)V×U(1)V away from large N. We also discuss three-flavour QCD with strange quark mass splitting and applications to more exotic symmetry breaking patterns of potential relevance for composite Higgs models.