Thermal dynamics of quarks and mesons N=2*Yang-Mills theory

We study the dynamics of quenched fundamental matter in N = 2* supersymmetric large N-c SU(N-c) Yang-Mills theory, extending our earlier work to finite temperature. We use probe D7-branes in the holographically dual thermalized generalization of the N = 2* Pilch-Warner gravitational background found by Buchel and Liu. Such a system provides an opportunity to study how key features of the dynamics are affected by being in a non-conformal setting where there is an intrinsic scale, set here by the mass, m(H), of a hypermultiplet. Such studies are motivated by connections to experimental studies of the quark-gluon plasma at RHIC and LHC, where the microscopic theory of the constituents, QCD, has a scale, Lambda(QCD). We show that the binding energy of mesons in the N = 2* theory is increased in the presence of the scale m(H), and that subsequently the meson-melting temperature is higher than for the conformal case.