Event Details

Monopole operators in CFTs doped by a chemical potential are thought to serve as order parameters for solid phases in the IR. Via electric-magnetic duality, these monopole operators are mapped to electrically charged operators coupled to a background magnetic field. In the bulk gravitational description, this allows us to view the formation of the solid by studying vortex lattice formation in the theory of a charged scalar moving in a background magnetic field. For certain Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton systems, we analytically solve the coupled partial differential equations which govern the charged scalar, gauge field, and metric degrees of freedom to lowest non-trivial order in an expansion around the critical point. This results in a metric, which has a crystalline form at leading order in the linearized approximation. Finally, we discuss the corrections to the free energy and thermodynamic functions arising from the formation of the lattice.

Video Recording