Unquenched massive flavors and flows in Chern-Simons matter theories

Abstract

We construct a holographic dual to the three-dimensional ABJM Chern-Simons matter theory with unquenched massive flavors. The flavor degrees of freedom are introduced by means of D6-branes extended along the gauge theory directions and delocalized in the internal space. To find the solution we have to solve the supergravity equations of motion with the source terms introduced by the D6-branes. The background we get is a running solution representing the renormalization group flow between two fixed points, at the IR and the UV, in both of which the geometry is of the form AdS_4 x M_6, where M_6 is a six-dimensional compact manifold. Along the flow, N=1 supersymmetry is preserved and the flavor group is Abelian. The flow is generated by changing the quark mass m_q. When m_q is very large we recover the original unflavored ABJM solution, while for m_q very small our solution becomes asymptotically equivalent to the one found recently for massless smeared flavors. We study the effects of the dynamical quarks as their mass is varied on different observables, such as the holographic entanglement entropy, the quark-antiquark potential, the two-point functions of high dimension bulk operators, and the mass spectrum of mesons.