Moduli Spaces of Cold Holographic Matter

Understand

We use holography to study (3+1)-dimensional N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with gauge group SU(Nc), in the large-Nc and large-coupling limits, coupled to a single massless (n+1)-dimensional hypermultiplet in the fundamental representation of SU(Nc), with n=3,2,1.

• In particular, we study zero-temperature states with a nonzero baryon number charge density, which we call holographic matter.
• We demonstrate that a moduli space of such states exists in these theories, specifically a Higgs branch parameterized by the expectation values of scalar operators bilinear in the hypermultiplet scalars.
• At a generic point on the Higgs branch, the R-symmetry and gauge group are spontaneously broken to subgroups.