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  • Open Access

Chiral symmetry restoration for helical magnetic fields in holography

Nick Evans* and Wanxiang Fan†

  • School of Physics and Astronomy and STAG Research Centre, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom

  • *Contact author: n.j.evans@soton.ac.uk
  • †Contact author: w.fan@soton.ac.uk
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 126005 – Published 5 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/pg5m-8kmg

Abstract

We study the chiral symmetry breaking effects of helical magnetic fields in a simple bottom up AdS/CFT model. We explore the instability of the chirally symmetric solution in the presence of the B field and see how it switches off as the wave vector of the helix, k, rises, resulting in a first order transition. At low energies the model averages over the helix and the magnetic field is not seen. We show that other sources of chiral symmetry breaking are not directly affected by the helical B field. We provide examples of both magnetic catalysis and inverse magnetic catalysis which switch off at large k.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 126005– Published 5 December, 2025
  • Received 8 October 2025
  • Accepted 21 November 2025
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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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