Cavitation effects on the confinement/deconfinement transition

Cavitation is a process where the viscous terms in a relativistic fluid result in reducing the effective pressure, thus facilitating the nucleation of bubbles of a stable phase. The effect is particularly pronounced in the vicinity of a (weak) first-order phase transition. We use the holographic correspondence to study cavitation in a strongly coupled planar cascading gauge theory plasma close to the confinement/deconfinement phase transition. While in this particular model the shift of the deconfinement temperature due to cavitation does not exceed 5%, we speculate that cavitation might be important near the QCD critical point

Cold holographic matter in the Higgs branch

We study collective excitations of cold (2+1) -dimensional fundamental matter living on a defect of the four-dimensional N=4 super Yang–Mills theory in the Higgs branch. This system is realized holographically as a D3–D5 brane intersection, in which the D5-brane is treated as a probe with a non-zero gauge flux across the internal part of its worldvolume. We study the holographic zero sound mode in the collisionless regime at low temperature and find a simple analytic result for its dispersion relation. We also find the diffusion constant of the system in the hydrodynamic regime at higher temperature. In both cases we study the dependence on the flux parameter which determines the amount of Higgs symmetry breaking. We also discuss the anyonization of this construction

On the infrared behavior of the shear spectral function in hot Yang-Mills theory

We revisit the determination of the two-loop spectral function in the shear channel of hot Yang-Mills theory. Correcting a technical error in an earlier computation is seen to improve the infrared behavior of the quantity significantly, while a partial Hard Thermal Loop resummation is seen to have only a very minor numerical effect on the result. These facts make it possible to straightforwardly apply the spectral function to the corresponding imaginary time correlator and the shear sum rule

Next-to-eikonal corrections in the CGC: gluon production and spin asymmetries in pA collisions

We present a new method to systematically include corrections to the eikonal approximation in the background field formalism. Specifically, we calculate the subleading, power-suppressed corrections due to the finite width of the target or the finite energy of the projectile. Such power-suppressed corrections involve Wilson lines decorated by gradients of the background field — thus related to the density - of the target. The method is of generic applicability. As a first example, we study single inclusive gluon production in pA collisions, and various related spin asymmetries, beyond the eikonal accuracy

Magnetothermodynamics of BPS baby skyrmions

The magnetothermodynamics of skyrmion type matter described by the gauged BPS baby Skyrme model at zero temperature is investigated. We prove that the BPS property of the model is preserved also for boundary conditions corresponding to an asymptotically constant magnetic field. The BPS bound and the corresponding BPS equations saturating the bound are found. Further, we show that one may introduce pressure in the gauged model by a redefinition of the superpotential. Interestingly, this is related to non-extremal type solutions in the so-called fake supersymmetry method. Finally, we compute the equation of state of magnetized BSP baby skyrmions inserted into an external constant magnetic field H and under external pressure P , i.e., V = V ( P, H ), where V is the “volume” (area) occupied by the skyrmions. We show that the BPS baby skyrmions form a ferromagnetic medium

Topological phase transitions in the gauged BPS baby Skyrme model

We demonstrate that the gauged BPS baby Skyrme model with a double vacuum potential allows for phase transitions from a non-solitonic to a solitonic phase, where the latter corresponds to a ferromagnetic liquid. Such a transition can be generated by increasing the external pressure P or by turning on an external magnetic field H . As a consequence, the topological phase where gauged BPS baby skyrmions exist, is a higher density phase. For smaller densities, obtained for smaller values of P and H , a phase without solitons is reached. We find the critical line in the P, H parameter space. Furthermore, in the soliton phase, we find the equation of state for the baby skyrmion matter V = V ( P,H ) at zero temperature, where V is the “volume”, i.e., area of the solitons

KLWMIJ Reggeon field theory beyond the large N c limit

We extend the analysis of KLWMIJ evolution in terms of QCD Reggeon fields beyond leading order in the 1/ N c expansion. We show that there is only one type of corrections to the leading order Hamiltonian discussed in [1]. These are terms linear in original Reggeons and quadratic in conjugate Reggeon operators. All of these have the interpretation as vertices of the “‘merging”’ type 2 → 1, where two Reggeons merge into one. Importantly, the triple Pomeron merging vertex does not emerge from the KLWMIJ Hamiltonian. We show that, although in the range of applicability of the KLWMIJ Hamiltonian these merging terms are subleading in N c , in the dense-dense regime they all become of the same (leading) order in N c . In this regime vertices involving higher Reggeons are enhanced by inverse powers of the coupling constant

PDF reweighting in the Hessian matrix approach

We introduce the Hessian reweighting of parton distribution functions (PDFs). Similarly to the better-known Bayesian methods, its purpose is to address the compatibility of new data and the quantitative modifications they induce within an existing set of PDFs. By construction, the method discussed here applies to the PDF fits that carried out a Hessian error analysis using a non-zero tolerance Δ χ 2 . The principle is validated by considering a simple, transparent example. We are also able to establish an agreement with the Bayesian technique provided that the tolerance criterion is appropriately accounted for and that a purely exponential Bayesian likelihood is assumed. As a practical example, we discuss the inclusive jet production at the LHC

Reggeon field theory for large Pomeron loops

We analyze the range of applicability of the high energy Reggeon Field Theory H RFT derived in [1]. We show that this theory is valid as long as at any intermediate value of rapidity η throughout the evolution at least one of the colliding objects is dilute. Importantly, at some values of η the dilute object could be the projectile, while at others it could be the target, so that H RFT does not reduce to either H JIMWLK or H KLWMIJ . When both objects are dense, corrections to the evolution not accounted for in [1] become important. The same limitation applies to other approaches to high energy evolution available today, such as for example [2, 3] and [4-6]. We also show that, in its regime of applicability H RFT can be simplified. We derive the simpler version of H RFT and in the large N c limit rewrite it in terms of the Reggeon creation and annihilation operators. The resulting H RFT is explicitly self dual and provides the generalization of the Pomeron calculus developed in [4-6] by including higher Reggeons in the evolution. It is applicable for description of ‘large’ Pomeron loops, namely Reggeon graphs where all the splittings occur close in rapidity to one dilute object (projectile), while all the merging close to the other one (target). Additionally we derive, in the same regime expressions for single and double inclusive gluon production (where the gluons are not separated by a large rapidity interval) in terms of the Reggeon degrees of freedom

Holographic zero sound at finite temperature in the Sakai-Sugimoto model

In this paper, we study the fate of the holographic zero sound mode at finite temperature and non-zero baryon density in the deconfined phase of the Sakai-Sugimoto model of holographic QCD. We establish the existence of such a mode for a wide range of temperatures and investigate the dispersion relation, quasi-normal modes, and spectral functions of the collective excitations in four different regimes, namely, the collisionless quantum, collisionless thermal, and two distinct hydrodynamic regimes. For sufficiently high temperatures, the zero sound completely disappears, and the low energy physics is dominated by an emergent diffusive mode. We compare our findings to Landau-Fermi liquid theory and to other holographic models