(Non)renormalization of Anomalous Conductivities and Holography

Abstract

The chiral magnetic and the chiral vortical effects are recently discovered phenomena arising from chiral gauge and gravitational anomalies that lead to generation of electric currents in presence of magnetic field or vorticity. The magnitude of these effects is determined by the anomalous conductivities. These conductivities can be calculated by the linear response theory, and in the strong coupling limit this calculation can be carried out by the holographic techniques. Earlier calculations in case of conformal field theories indicate non-renormalization of these conductivities where the holographic calculation agrees with the free field limit. We extend this holographic study to non-conformal theories exhibiting mass-gap and confinement-deconfinement type transitions in a holographic model based on the analytic black hole solution of Gao and Zhang. We show that radiative corrections are also absent in these non-conformal theories confirming indirect arguments of Jensen et al in a direct and non-trivial fashion. There are various indications in field theory that such radiative corrections should arise when contribution of dynamical gluon fields to the chiral anomaly is present. Motivated by this, we seek for such corrections in the holographic picture and argue that such corrections indeed arise through mixing of the background and its fluctuations with the axion and the one-form fields that couple to the flavor and probe gauge branes through the Wess-Zumino terms. These corrections are non-vanishing when the flavor to color ratio $N_f/N_c$ is finite, therefore they are only visible in the Veneziano limit at large $N_c$.