Holographic Nuclei

Abstract

We provide a dual gravity description of heavy atomic nuclei, via AdS/CFT correspondence. In holographic QCD such as Sakai-Sugimoto model, baryons are D-branes wrapping a sphere in 10 dimensional curved spacetime, so any nucleus is a collection of $A$ such D-branes where $A$ is mass number of the nucleus. Quantum theory on the nucleus is ADHM-like U(A) Yang-Mills-Higgs theory on the sphere. Taking a large $A$ limit (corresponding to heavy nuclei) leads to a dual gravity describing collective excitataions of constituent nucleons of the heavy nucleus. This dual gravity computes spectra of the heavy nucleus, and gives discrete states whose gap roughly agrees with experimental nuclear data.