Thermodynamics of the Isospectral family of holographic vector mesons

Abstract

We study the thermal behavior of the $ρ$ meson using the isospectral family of the softwall AdS/QCD model. By computing spectral functions at finite temperature and chemical potential for different members of this family, we isolate the effect of the ground-state electromagnetic decay constant $f_1$ on the melting temperature $T_m$ of the $ρ(770)$ meson. A clear monotonic increase of $T_m$ with $f_1$ is found, supporting the interpretation of $f_1$ as a key scale controlling quarkonium dissociation. For excited states, the same qualitative trend appears but is strongly suppressed as the radial quantum number increases. Using the isospectral parameter to fix $f_1$ to its experimental value ($226$ MeV) yields a holographic model whose spectral function gives a melting temperature $T_m = 157$ MeV and a smooth crossover from confinement to deconfinement. The thermal mass shows a mild decrease near the critical point, while the width grows monotonically. Our results demonstrate that the isospectral transformation provides a controlled way to adjust ground-state decay constants without altering the mass spectrum, enabling precise studies of medium effects on vector mesons.