Strongly interacting anisotropic gauge theories and holography

Abstract

The AdS/CFT correspondence has become, since its development in the late 90's, one of the most useful tools to study large N gauge theories. These theories share most of the key characteristics of quantum chromodynamics, and therefore holography can be used to explore strong interactions in the regimes where perturbative and lattice QCD fail. In recent years, a growing effort has been put into the study of anisotropic many body systems using these tools. In this work, we consider a generic class of such systems driven by a parametric family of dilaton and axion potentials in the gravity side, and look for the IR asymptotics of the bulk geometry. We also investigate the thermodynamics of the system and study the con?finement-decon?finement phase transition.