Inverse magnetic catalysis in holographic models of QCD

Abstract

We study the effect of magnetic field $B$ on the critical temperature $T_c$ of the confinement-deconfinement phase transition in hard-wall AdS/QCD, and holographic duals of flavored and unflavored $\mathcal{N}=4$ super-Yang Mills theories on ${\mathbb{R}}^3\times {\mathrm{S}}^1$. For all of the holographic models, we find that $T_c(B)$ decreases with increasing magnetic field $B\ll T^2$, consistent with the inverse magnetic catalysis recently observed in lattice QCD for $B\lesssim 1Ge{V}^2$. We also predict that, for large magnetic field $B\gg T^2$, the critical temperature $T_c(B)$, eventually, starts to increase with increasing magnetic field $B\gg T^2$ and asymptotes to a constant value.

Comments: 19 pages, 2 figures, an appendix (which discusses the large magnetic field case) added, references added; typo fixed, more footnotes added, accepted for publication in JHEP