Inverse anisotropic catalysis in holographic QCD

We investigate the effects of anisotropy on the chiral condensate in a holographic model of QCD with a fully backreacted quark sector at vanishing chemical potential. The high temperature deconfined phase is therefore a neutral and anisotropic plasma showing different pressure gradients along different spatial directions, similar to the state produced in noncentral heavy-ion collisions. We find that the chiral transition occurs at a lower temperature in the presence of anisotropy. Equivalently, we find that anisotropy acts destructively on the chiral condensate near the transition temperature. These are precisely the same footprints as the “inverse magnetic catalysis” i.e. the destruction of the condensate with increasing magnetic field observed earlier on the lattice, in effective field theory models and in holography. Based on our findings we suggest, in accordance with the conjecture of [1], that the cause for the inverse magnetic catalysis may be the anisotropy caused by the presence of the magnetic field instead of the charge dynamics created by it. We conclude that the weakening of the chiral condensate due to anisotropy is more general than that due to a magnetic field and we coin the former “inverse anisotropic catalysis”. Finally, we observe that any amount of anisotropy changes the IR physics substantially: the geometry is AdS4 × ℝ up to small corrections, confinement is present only up to a certain scale, and the particles acquire finite widths.