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Searching for an Attractive Force in Holographic Nuclear Physics

We are looking for a holographic explanation of nuclear forces, especially the attractive forces. Recently, the repulsive hard core of a nucleon-nucleon potential was obtained in the Sakai-Sugimoto model, and we show that a generalized version of that model -- with an asymmetric configuration of the flavor D8 branes -- also has an attractive potential. While the repulsive potential stems from the Chern-Simons interactions of the U(2) flavor gauge fields in 5D, the attractive potential is due to a coupling of the gauge fields to a scalar field describing fluctuations of the flavor branes' geometry. At intermediate distances r between baryons -- smaller than R_KK=O(1)/M_{omega meson} but larger than the radius rho=R_KK/sqrt('t Hooft coupling) of the instanton at the core of a baryon -- both the attractive and the repulsive potentials behave as 1/r^2, but the attractive potential is weaker: Depending on the geometry of the flavor D8 branes, the ratio C=-V_attr/V_rep ranges from 0 to 1/9. The 5D scalar fields also affect the isovector tensor and spin-spin forces, and the overall effect is similar to the isoscalar central forces: V(r)->(1-C)*V(r). At longer ranges $r\gtrsim R_{\rm KK}$, we find that the attractive potential decays faster than the repulsive potential, so the net potential is always repulsive. This unrealistic behavior may be peculiar to the Sakai-Sugimoto-like models, or it could be a general problem of the large N_c limit inherent in holography.