Identifying sea and valence quarks in a magnetically driven catalysis
In the present work, we study the magnetic response of a holographic plasma in a D3/D7 setup through the quasinormal spectrum of D7-brane embedding fluctuations. Extending the spectral analysis to nonzero spatial momentum, we show that the modes become increasingly quasiparticle-like as the kinetic momentum grows at fixed magnetic field, while increasing the field at fixed kinetic momentum suppresses this character. The possible existence of these competing effects in an actual quark-gluon plasma could account, on the one hand, for the partial success of quasiparticle-based effective descriptions due to the presence of a substantial population of modes stabilized by their high momentum, and, on the other, for the difficulty of isolating experimental signatures of such constituents because of the magnetic suppression that dominates at low momentum. Within the same setup, we introduce a holographic prescription to describe the contribution of valence and sea quarks to the phenomena of magnetic catalysis and its inverse, characterized herein through the induced expectation value of a scalar operator. We apply this prescription at vanishing spatial momentum to perform an initial calculation leading to results that are in agreement with those obtained from lattice QCD.