Holographic flows and thermodynamics of Polyakov loop impurities

Abstract: We study holographic probes dual to heavy quark impurities interpolating between fundamental and symmetric/antisymmetric tensor representations in strongly coupled N=4 supersymmetric gauge theory. These correspond to non-conformal D3- and D5-brane probe embeddings in AdS_5 x S^5 exhibiting flows on their world-volumes. By examining the asymptotic regimes of the embeddings and the one-point function of static fields sourced by the boundary impurity, we conclude that the D5-brane embedding describes the screening of fundamental quarks in the UV into an antisymmetric source in the IR, whilst the non-conformal, D3-brane solution interpolates between the symmetric representation in the UV and fundamental sources in the IR. The D5-brane embeddings exhibit nontrivial thermodynamics with multiple branches of solutions, whilst the thermal analogue of the interpolating D3-brane solution does not appear to exist.