Confined phases at finite density in the hardwall model

Abstract

Anti–de Sitter/QCD models are being extensively studied because they seem to offer an entirely tractable and radically different approach to the phases of QCD whose region of validity is precisely the region of strong interactions. In this context, a missing ingredient has been the absence of a bulk description dual to a hadronic phase at finite baryon density. In this work, we discuss a class of backgrounds that fill this lacuna. Applying physically motivated boundary conditions, we obtain phase diagrams which compare reasonably with approaches based on the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasino model. We also show that such backgrounds can play a similar role in geometries with a dilaton field. Published by the American Physical Society 2025