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  • Open Access

Worldvolume fermion as baryon with homogeneous instantons in holographic QCD3

Si-wen Li1,* and Xiao-tong Zhang2

  • *Contact author: siwenli@dlmu.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 026001 – Published 1 July, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/d1p6-4yl9

Abstract

We investigate holographically the effective theory of the worldvolume fermion on the flavor branes in the D3/D7 model with homogeneously smeared D(-1)-branes. As a top-down approach in gauge-gravity duality, the D(-1)-branes are instantons and violate the CP symmetry in the dual theory. The background geometry of this model contains black brane (deconfined geometry) and bubble D3-brane solutions (confined geometry), all with a nonzero Ramond-Ramond zero form as axion. The dual theories to the backgrounds are respectively the Super Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature and three-dimensional confining Yang-Mills theory, all with a Chern-Simons term induced by instantons. In the confined geometry, we introduce a baryon vertex as a D5-brane wrapped on S5, then identify the fermionic fluxes produced by the Nc open strings on the D7-brane as a baryonic operator. Afterwards, we study the spectrum and the holographic correlation function of the baryonic fermion on the D7-branes. Remarkably, the fermionic spectrum is in agreement with the dispersion curves obtained from the confined correlation function, and the mass ratio of the lowest baryon and meson in our model is close to the associated experimental data. Moreover, the effective interaction terms of the holographic baryon and meson are derived and all the coupling constants take order of Nc1/2 agreeing with the evaluation from the large Nc field theory. In the deconfined geometry, the holographic correlation function is also evaluated numerically while the fermion on D7-brane is identified to plasmino instead of baryon. The dispersion curves from the deconfined correlation function basically cover the results from the hard thermal loop approximation and may imply the instanton-induced interaction with spin. Overall, this work constructs a holographic theory about baryonic fermion and mesonic boson with instantons or CP violation.

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Corrections

4 February, 2026

Correction: The omission of an affiliation for the second author has been corrected.

Article Text

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 026001– Published 1 July, 2025
  • Received 8 April 2025
  • Accepted 15 June 2025
  • Corrected 4 February 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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