(Super)Yang-Mills at Finite Heavy-Quark Density

Understand

We study the gravitational duals of $d$-dimensional Yang-Mills theories with $d\leq 6$ in the presence of an ${\cal O} (N^2)$ density of heavy quarks, with $N$ the number of colors.

• For concreteness we focus on maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills, but our results apply to a larger class of theories with or without supersymmetry.
• The gravitational solutions describe renormalization group flows towards infrared scaling geometries characterized by fixed dynamical and hyperscaling-violating exponents.
• The special case $d=5$ yields an $AdS_3 \times \mathbb{R}^4 \times S^4$ geometry upon uplifting to M-theory.