Conformal symmetry breaking and degeneracy of high-lying unflavored mesons

Abstract: We show that though conformal symmetry can be broken by the dilaton, such can happen without breaking the conformal degeneracy patterns in the spectra. We departure from R^1XS^3 slicing of AdS_5 noticing that the inverse radius, R, of S^3 relates to the temperature of the deconfinement phase transition and has to satisfy, \hbar c/R >> \Lambda_{QCD}. We then focus on the eigenvalue problem of the S^3 conformal Laplacian, given by 1/R^2 (K^2+1), with K^2 standing for the Casimir invariant of the so(4) algebra. Such a spectrum is characterized by a (K+1)^2 fold degeneracy of its levels, with K\in [0,\infty). We then break the conformal S^3 metric as, d\tilde{s}^2=e^{-b\chi} ((1+b^2/4) d\chi^2 +\sin^2\chi (d\theta ^2 +\sin^2\theta d\varphi ^2)), and attribute the symmetry breaking scale, b\hbar^2c^2/R^2, to the dilaton. We show that such a metric deformation is equivalent to a breaking of the conformal curvature of S^3 by a term proportional to b\cot \chi, and that the perturbed conformal Laplacian is equivalent to (\tilde{K}^2 +c_K), with c_K a representation constant, and \tilde{K}^2 being again an so(4) Casimir invariant, but this time in a representation unitarily inequivalent to the 4D rotational. In effect, the spectra before and after the symmetry breaking are determined each by eigenvalues of a Casimir invariant of an so(4) algebra, a reason for which the degeneracies remain unaltered though the conformal group symmetry breaks at the level of the representation of its algebra. We fit the S^3 radius and the \hbar^2c^2b/R^2 scale to the high-lying excitations in the spectra of the unflavored mesons, and observe the correct tendency of the \hbar c /R=373 MeV value to notably exceed \Lambda_{QCD}. The size of the symmetry breaking scale is calculated as \hbar c \sqrt{b}/R=673.7 MeV.