Fate of Z(N) walls in hot holographic QCD

Abstract

We first study Z(N) walls in a deconfined phase of Witten's D4-brane background of pure SU(N) Yang-Mills theory, motivated by a recent work in the case of N=4 SYM. Similarly to it, we propose that for a large wall charge k ~ N, it is described by k D2-branes blown up into a NS5-brane wrapping S^3 inside S^4 via Myers effect, and we calculate the tension by suitable U-duality. We find a precise Casimir scaling for the tension formula. We then study the fate of Z(N)-vacua in a presence of fundamental flavors in quenched approximation via gauge/gravity correspondence. In the case of D3/D7 system where one can vary the mass m_q of flavors, we show that there is a phase transition at T_c ~ m_q, below which the Z(N)-vacua survive while they are lifted above the critical temperature. We analytically calculate the energy lift of k'th vacua in the massless case, both in the D3/D7 system and in the Sakai-Sugimoto model.