Abstract
In Landau Fermi liquids, screened impurities support quasi-bound states, representing electrons bound to the impurity but making virtual excursions away. Signals of these quasi-bound states are electron-impurity scattering phase shifts and the corresponding resonances in cross sections. We consider large-N , strongly-coupled (3 + 1)-dimensional \( \mathcal{N} \) = 4 supersymmetric SU(N ) Yang-Mills theory on the Coulomb branch, where an adjoint scalar has a non-zero expectation value that breaks SU(N ) → SU(N − 1) × U(1). In the holographic dual we re-visit well-known solutions for a probe D3-brane that describe this theory with a symmetric-representation Wilson line “impurity”. We present evidence that the adjoint scalar screens the Wilson line, by showing that quasi-bound states form at the impurity, producing U(1)-impurity scattering phase shifts and corresponding resonances in cross sections. The quasi-bound states appear holographically as quasi-normal modes of probe D3-brane fields, even in the absence of a black hole horizon, via a mechanism that we argue is generic to screened defects in holography. We also argue that well-known generalisations of these probe D3-brane solutions can describe lattices of screened Wilson/’t Hooft line impurities.
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Evans, N., O’Bannon, A. & Rodgers, R. Holographic Wilson lines as screened impurities. J. High Energ. Phys. 2020, 188 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2020)188
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2020)188