Quarks in an External Electric Field in Finite Temperature Large N Gauge Theory

Understand

We use a ten dimensional dual string background to aspects of the physics large N four dimensional SU(N) gauge theory, where its fundamental quarks are charged under a background electric field.

• The theory is N=2 supersymmetric for vanishing temperature and electric field.
• At zero temperature, we observe that the electric field induces a phase transition associated with the dissociation of the mesons into their constituent quarks.
• This is an analogue of an insulator-metal transition, since the system goes from being an insulator with zero current (in the applied field) to a conductor with free charge carriers (the quarks).