Holographic colour superconductors at finite coupling with NJL Interactions

We study a bottom-up holographic description of the QCD colour superconducting phase in the presence of higher derivative corrections. We expand this holographic model in the context of Gauss–Bonnet (GB) gravity. The Cooper pair condensate has been investigated in the deconfinement phase for different values of the GB coupling parameter $$\lambda _{G B}$$ λ GB , we observe a change in the value of the critical chemical potential $$\mu _c$$ μ c in comparison to Einstein gravity. We find that $$\mu _c$$ μ c grows as $$\lambda _{G B}$$ λ GB increases. We add four fermion interactions and show that in the presence of these corrections the main interesting features of the model are still present and that the intrinsic attractive interaction can not be switched off. This study suggests to find GB corrections to equation of state of holographic QCD matter.

Gradient flow and holography from a local Wilsonian cutoff

We consider the vacuum partition function of a 4d scalar QFT in a curved background as function of bare marginal and relevant couplings. A local UV cutoff $$\Lambda (x)$$ Λ ( x ) transforming under Weyl rescalings allows to construct Weyl invariant kinetic terms including Wilsonian cutoff functions. The local cutoff can be absorbed completely by a rescaling of the metric and the bare couplings. The vacuum partition function satisfies consistency conditions which follow from the Abelian nature of local redefinitions of the cutoff, and which differ from Weyl rescalings. These imply a gradient flow for beta functions describing the cutoff dependence of rescaled bare couplings. The consistency conditions allow to satisfy all but one Hamiltonian constraints required for a holographic description of the flow of bare couplings with the cutoff.

Strong-coupling results for $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 2 superconformal quivers and holography

We consider $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 2 superconformal quiver gauge theories in four dimensions and evaluate the chiral/anti-chiral correlators of single-trace operators. We show that it is convenient to form particular twisted and untwisted combinations of these operators suggested by the dual holographic description of the theory. The various twisted sectors are orthogonal and the correlators in each sector have always the same structure, as we show at the lowest orders in perturbation theory with Feynman diagrams. Using localization we then map the computation to a matrix model. In this way we are able to obtain formal expressions for the twisted correlators in the planar limit that are valid for all values of the ‘t Hooft coupling λ, and find that they are proportional to 1/λ at strong coupling. We successfully test the correctness of our extrapolation against a direct numerical evaluation of the matrix model and argue that the 1/λ behavior qualitatively agrees with the holographic description.

Comments on the holographic description of Narain theories

We discuss the holographic description of Narain U(1)c× U(1)c conformal field theories, and their potential similarity to conventional weakly coupled gravitational theories in the bulk, in the sense that the effective IR bulk description includes “U(1) gravity” amended with additional light degrees of freedom. Starting from this picture, we formulate the hypothesis that in the large central charge limit the density of states of any Narain theory is bounded by below by the density of states of U(1) gravity. This immediately implies that the maximal value of the spectral gap for primary fields is ∆1 = c/(2πe). To test the self-consistency of this proposal, we study its implications using chiral lattice CFTs and CFTs based on quantum stabilizer codes. First we notice that the conjecture yields a new bound on quantum stabilizer codes, which is compatible with previously known bounds in the literature. We proceed to discuss the variance of the density of states, which for consistency must be vanishingly small in the large-c limit. We consider ensembles of code and chiral theories and show that in both cases the density variance is exponentially small in the central charge.

Bubble wall velocity at strong coupling

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.

Holographic path-integral optimization

In this work we elaborate on holographic description of the path-integral optimization in conformal field theories (CFT) using Hartle-Hawking wave functions in Anti-de Sitter spacetimes. We argue that the maximization of the Hartle-Hawking wave function is equivalent to the path-integral optimization procedure in CFT. In particular, we show that metrics that maximize gravity wave functions computed in particular holographic geometries, precisely match those derived in the path-integral optimization procedure for their dual CFT states. The present work is a detailed version of [1] and contains many new results such as analysis of excited states in various dimensions including JT gravity, and a new way of estimating holographic path-integral complexity from Hartle-Hawking wave functions. Finally, we generalize the analysis to Lorentzian Anti-de Sitter and de Sitter geometries and use it to shed light on path-integral optimization in Lorentzian CFTs.

Supercharged AdS3 Holography

Given an asymptotically Anti-de Sitter supergravity solution, one can obtain a microscopic interpretation by identifying the corresponding state in the holographically dual conformal field theory. This is of particular importance for heavy pure states that are candidate black hole microstates. Expectation values of light operators in such heavy CFT states are encoded in the asymptotic expansion of the dual bulk configuration. In the D1-D5 system, large families of heavy pure CFT states have been proposed to be holographically dual to smooth horizonless supergravity solutions. We derive the precision holographic dictionary in a new sector of light operators that are superdescendants of scalar chiral primaries of dimension (1,1). These operators involve the action of the supercharges of the chiral algebra, and they play a central role in the proposed holographic description of recently-constructed supergravity solutions known as “supercharged superstrata”. We resolve the mixing of single-trace and multi-trace operators in the CFT to identify the combinations that are dual to single-particle states in the bulk. We identify the corresponding gauge-invariant combinations of supergravity fields. We use this expanded dictionary to probe the proposed holographic description of supercharged superstrata, finding precise agreement between gravity and CFT.

Holographic Description of Noncommutative Schwinger Effect

We consider the phenomenon of spontaneous pair production in the presence of an external electric field for noncommutative Yang-Mills theories. Using Maldacena’s holographic conjecture, the threshold electric field for pair production is computed from the quark/antiquark potential for noncommutative theories. As an effect of noncommutativity, the threshold electric field is seen to be smaller than its commutative counterpart. We also estimate the correction to the production rate of quark/antiquark pairs to the first order of the noncommutative deformation parameter. Our result bears resemblance with an earlier related work (based on field-theoretic methods).

Lifshitz tails at spectral edge and holography with a finite cutoff

We propose the holographic description of the Lifshitz tail typical for one-particle spectral density of bounded disordered system in D = 1 space. To this aim the “polymer representation” of the Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) 2D dilaton gravity at a finite cutoff is used and the corresponding partition function is considered as the weighted sum over paths of fixed length in an external magnetic field. We identify the regime of small loops, responsible for emergence of a Lifshitz tail in the Gaussian disorder, and relate the strength of disorder to the boundary value of the dilaton. The geometry corresponding to the Poisson disorder in the boundary theory involves random paths fluctuating in the vicinity of the hard impenetrable cut-off disc in a 2D plane. It is shown that the ensemble of “stretched” paths evading the disc possesses the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) scaling for fluctuations, which is the key property that ensures the dual description of the Lifshitz tail in the spectral density for the Poisson disorder.

Correlation functions and quantum measures of descendant states

We discuss a computer implementation of a recursive formula to calculate correlation functions of descendant states in two-dimensional CFT. This allows us to obtain any N-point function of vacuum descendants, or to express the correlator as a differential operator acting on the respective primary correlator in case of non-vacuum descendants. With this tool at hand, we then study some entanglement and distinguishability measures between descendant states, namely the Rényi entropy, trace square distance and sandwiched Rényi divergence. Our results provide a test of the conjectured Rényi QNEC and new tools to analyse the holographic description of descendant states at large c.