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arXiv · 1006.2546

Supergravity Instabilities of Non-Supersymmetric Quantum Critical Points

Nikolay Bobev·Nick Halmagyi·Krzysztof Pilch·Nicholas P. Warner
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Abstract

Motivated by the recent use of certain consistent truncations of M-theory to study condensed matter physics using holographic techniques, we study the SU(3)-invariant sector of four-dimensional, N=8 gauged supergravity and compute the complete scalar spectrum at each of the five non-trivial critical points. We demonstrate that the smaller SU(4)^- sector is equivalent to a consistent truncation studied recently by various authors and find that the critical point in this sector, which has been proposed as the ground state of a holographic superconductor, is unstable due to a family of scalars that violate the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound. We also derive the origin of this instability in eleven dimensions and comment on the generalization to other embeddings of this critical point which involve arbitrary Sasaki-Einstein seven manifolds. In the spirit of a resurging interest in consistent truncations, we present a formal treatment of the SU(3)-invariant sector as a U(1)xU(1) gauged N=2 supergravity theory coupled to one hypermultiplet.

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Nikolay Bobev, Nick Halmagyi, Krzysztof Pilch, Nicholas P. Warner. 2010-06-13. Supergravity Instabilities of Non-Supersymmetric Quantum Critical Points. https://doi.org/10.1088/0264-9381%2F27%2F23%2F235013

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