Decay constants in soft wall AdS/QCD revisited

Phenomenological AdS/QCD models, like hard wall and soft wall, provide hadronic mass spectra in reasonable consistency with experimental and (or) lattice results. These simple models are inspired in the AdS/CFT correspondence and assume that gauge/gravity duality holds in a scenario where conformal invariance is broken through the introduction of an energy scale. Another important property of hadrons: the decay constant, can also be obtained from these models. However, a consistent formulation of an AdS/QCD model that reproduces the observed behavior of decay constants of vector meson excited states is still lacking. In particular: for radially excited states of heavy vector mesons, the experimental data lead to decay constants that decrease with the radial excitation level. We show here that a modified framework of soft wall AdS/QCD involving an additional dimensionfull parameter, associated with an ultraviolet energy scale, provides decay constants decreasing with radial excitation level. In this version of the soft wall model the two point function of gauge theory operators is calculated at a finite position of the anti-de Sitter space radial coordinate. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.