The Tachyon Chern-Simons action with a generic tachyon field, and baryons in V-QCD

Abstract

Consistency with global flavor anomalies requires the presence of Chern-Simons terms in holographic models of QCD. Such terms are analyzed in a setup arising in the holographic V-QCD model, where chiral symmetry breaking is implemented through the condensation of a complex scalar field, the tachyon. Using the superconnection formalism, the Tachyon-Chern-Simons terms are constructed explicitly in the general case, where the tachyon is any complex matrix in flavor space. This general case covers, among other things, backgrounds where different quark flavors have different masses. These new results are used to analyze the structure of the baryon solutions in the presence of nonzero quark masses. Expressions for the baryon number current and the total baryon number are found, and the baryon number is shown to be equal to the topological instanton number of the baryon solution. The effective four-dimensional pion action is analyzed and is shown to reproduce the chiral Lagrangian, including the Skyrme and Wess-Zumino-Witten terms.