2008/09/30 by Joshua L. Davis, Per Kraus, Akhil Shah · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #cond-mat.mes-hall #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2008/11/020
published as JHEP 0811:020,2008 · 27 pages, 6 figures, harvmac; v2, references and minor comments added, version to be submitted to JHEP; v3, corrections to section 4
openalex publication_date 2008/11/10 · arxiv created 2009/06/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We show how to model the transition between distinct quantum Hall plateaus in terms of D-branes in string theory. A low energy theory of 2+1 dimensional fermions is obtained by considering the D3-D7 system, and the plateau transition corresponds to moving the branes through one another. We study the transition at strong coupling using gauge/gravity duality and the probe approximation. Strong coupling leads to a novel kind of plateau transition: at low temperatures the transition remains discontinuous due to the effects of dynamical symmetry breaking and mass generation, and at high temperatures is only partially smoothed out.