Off-diagonal Flavour Susceptibilities from AdS/CFT

Abstract

We study flavour susceptibilities in the ${\cal N}=4$ SU(N) super Yang-Mills plasma coupled to two quark flavours at strong coupling and large $N$ by means of its gravity dual. The off-diagonal susceptibility is 1/N-suppressed and we compute it as a one-loop effect on the gravity side. Contrary to naive extrapolation from perturbative results, it attains a finite value in the infinite-coupling limit. Moreover, its parametric form is independent of whether or not meson bound states exist in the plasma. We conclude that caution must be exercised when drawing conclusions about the QCD plasma from lattice calculations of quark susceptibilities.