Chiral transition and meson melting within improved holographic soft wall models

Abstract: We describe the chiral transition for the quark condensate and the melting of scalar and vector mesons in two-flavor holographic QCD. This is done by extending the improved holographic soft wall models proposed in [1] to finite temperature, by means of introducing an asymptotically AdS black brane. We find that the chiral transition is second order in the chiral limit and a crossover for physical quark masses, as expected in two-flavor QCD. We investigate the melting of vector and scalar mesons in the deconfined plasma through the calculation of hadronic spectral functions. Fixing the model parameters by the meson spectrum at zero temperature, we find that the mesons melt at temperatures between $90$ and $110$ MeV and the chiral transition occurs around $129$ MeV. We also provide a prediction for the hydrodynamic diffusion constant associated with a flavor current in the deconfined plasma.