Cold holographic matter in the Higgs branch

Abstract

We study collective excitations of cold (2 + 1)-dimensional fundamental matter living on a defect of the four-dimensional N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory in the Higgs branch. This system is realized holographically as a D3-D5 brane intersection, in which the D5-brane is treated as a probe with a non-zero gauge flux across the internal part of its worldvolume. We study the holographic zero sound mode in the collisionless regime at low temperature and find a simple analytic result for its dispersion relation. We also find the diffusion constant of the system in the hydrodynamic regime at higher temperature. In both cases we study the dependence on the flux parameter which determines the amount of Higgs symmetry breaking. We also discuss the anyonization of this construction. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license.