Strong coupling effective Higgs potential and a first order thermal phase transition from AdS/CFT duality

Riccardo Apreda, Johanna Erdmenger, Nick Evans, and Zachary Guralnik
Phys. Rev. D 71, 126002 – Published 9 June 2005

Abstract

We use anti–de Sitter/conformal field theory duality to study the thermodynamics of a strongly coupled N=2 supersymmetric large Nc SU(Nc) gauge theory with Nf=2 fundamental hypermultiplets. At finite temperature T and isospin chemical potential μ, a potential on the Higgs branch is generated, corresponding to a potential on the moduli space of instantons in the anti–de Sitter description. For μ=0, there is a known first order phase transition around a critical temperature Tc. We find that the Higgs vacuum expectation value is a suitable order parameter for this transition; for T>Tc, the theory is driven to a nontrivial point on the Higgs branch. For μ0 and T=0, the Higgs potential is unbounded from below, leading to an instability of the field theory due to Bose-Einstein condensation.

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  • Received 13 May 2005

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.71.126002

©2005 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Riccardo Apreda1,2,*, Johanna Erdmenger1,2,†, Nick Evans3,‡, and Zachary Guralnik2,§

  • 1Max Planck-Institut für Physik (Werner Heisenberg-Institut), Föhringer Ring 6, D-80805 München, Germany
  • 2Institut für Physik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Newtonstraße 15, D-12489 Berlin, Germany
  • 3Department of Physics, Southampton University, Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom

  • *Electronic address: apreda@df.unipi.it
  • Electronic address: jke@mppmu.mpg.de
  • Electronic address: evans@phys.soton.ac.uk
  • §Electronic address: zack@physik.hu-berlin.de

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Issue

Vol. 71, Iss. 12 — 15 June 2005

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