Holographic Thermodynamics and Transport of Flavor Fields

Abstract

We use gauge-gravity duality to study a strongly-coupled non-Abelian gauge theory with flavor fields, i.e. fields transforming in the fundamental representation of the gauge group. We first study the thermodynamics of the flavor fields. In the grand canonical ensemble at zero temperature, we find a second-order transition when the mass of the flavor fields equals the chemical potential. We then study the transport properties of the flavor fields at finite temperature and density. We introduce external electric and magnetic fields and compute the resulting current of flavor charge. From this current we extract the conductivity, using Ohm's law. In addition, we compute the drag force on the flavor fields at large mass, in the presence of a finite baryon density and external electric and magnetic fields.