Inverse Anisotropic Catalysis in Holographic QCD

Understand

We investigate the effects of anisotropy on the chiral condensate in a holographic model of QCD with a fully backreacted quark sector at vanishing chemical potential.

• The high temperature deconfined phase is a neutral and anisotropic plasma showing different pressure gradients along different spatial directions, similar to the state produced in noncentral heavy-ion collisions.
• We find that the chiral transition occurs at a lower temperature in the presence of anisotropy.
• Equivalently, we find that anisotropy acts destructively on the chiral condensate near the transition temperature.