2005/04/19 by Riccardo Apreda, Johanna Erdmenger, Nick Evans +1 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Anti-de Sitter space #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Geometry #Higgs boson #Higgs field #Instanton #Mathematical physics #Moduli space #Order (exchange) #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Phase transition #Physics #Quantum mechanics #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.71.126002
published as Phys.Rev. D71 (2005) 126002 · 23 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2005/04/19 · openalex publication_date 2005/06/09 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We use anti--de Sitter/conformal field theory duality to study the thermodynamics of a strongly coupled N=2 supersymmetric large Nc SU(Nc) gauge theory with Nf=2 fundamental hypermultiplets. At finite temperature T and isospin chemical potential \ensuremathμ, a potential on the Higgs branch is generated, corresponding to a potential on the moduli space of instantons in the anti--de Sitter description. For \ensuremathμ=0, there is a known first order phase transition around a critical temperature Tc. We find that the Higgs vacuum expectation value is a suitable order parameter for this transition; for T>Tc, the theory is driven to a nontrivial point on the Higgs branch. For \ensuremathμ\ensuremath≠0 and T=0, the Higgs potential is unbounded from below, leading to an instability of the field theory due to Bose-Einstein condensation.