Non-equilibrium physics at a holographic chiral phase transition

Abstract

The D3/D7 system holographically describes an N =2 gauge theory which spontaneously breaks a chiral symmetry by the formation of a quark condensate in the presence of a magnetic field. At finite temperature it displays a first order phase transition. We study out of equilibrium dynamics associated with this transition by placing probe D7 branes in a geometry describing a boost-invariant expanding or contracting plasma. We use an adiabatic approximation to track the evolution of the quark condensate in a heated system and reproduce the phase structure expected from equilibrium dynamics. We then study solutions of the full partial differential equation that describes the evolution of out of equilibrium configurations to provide a complete description of the phase transition including describing aspects of bubble formation.

Holographic calculation of the QCD crossover temperature in a magnetic field

“…It would be certainly interesting to think about the construction of some holographic model versatile enough to quantitatively cover the entire electric-magnetic sector of the QGP, which is something that our simple EMD model is not able to do. We must remark, however, that up to now, our EMD model is the only holographic approach available in the literature 21 We use that a(r H ) = a 0 = 0 and φ(r H ) = φ 0 . which is able to match in a quantitative way the behavior of many magnetic field related observables calculated on the lattice.…”

A Review of Magnetic Phenomena in Probe-Brane Holographic Matter

“…Magnetic catalysis is also found in systems involving N f D7 branes where the backreaction of the metric on the background geometry is taken into account [25,26,27]. Out-of-equilibrium dynamics associated with the phase transition induced by magnetic catalysis has been investigated in [28].…”

The open string membrane paradigm with external electromagnetic fields

“…The study of gauge theories in the presence of electromagnetic fields in a holographic context has, over the last few years, been under intense investigation [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. As is frequently…”