Abstract
We use anti–de Sitter/conformal field theory duality to study the thermodynamics of a strongly coupled supersymmetric large gauge theory with fundamental hypermultiplets. At finite temperature and isospin chemical potential , 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 , there is a known first order phase transition around a critical temperature . We find that the Higgs vacuum expectation value is a suitable order parameter for this transition; for , the theory is driven to a nontrivial point on the Higgs branch. For and , the Higgs potential is unbounded from below, leading to an instability of the field theory due to Bose-Einstein condensation.
- Received 13 May 2005
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.71.126002
©2005 American Physical Society