Speaker
Description
Confinement is the phenomenon where quarks at low energies cannot propagate freely, but are confined into bound states of hadrons. At large temperatures hadrons break apart in a transition to a deconfined phase. Such transitions can also be induced by the curvature of the background spacetime, even at zero temperature. In this talk, I investigate curvature induced confinement transitions in QFTs living on positively curved space-times (de Sitter space) using holography. The holographic model consists of Einstein-scalar gravity where the bulk scalar field is assigned a potential that diverges exponentially at large field values. Acceptable interior boundary conditions are defined by requiring the existence of an uplift to a regular solution of higher-dimensional Einstein gravity. We find a competition of two types of saddles and a phase transition between them. We argue that when the leading exponent of the potential is above a certain bound, the transition is first-order, while below the bound, it is higher-order. The talk is based on arXiv:2502.04036 with Elias Kiritsis and Francesco Nitti.
