Strongly-coupled anisotropic gauge theories and holography

Abstract: We initiate a non-perturbative study of anisotropic, non-conformal and confining gauge theories that are holographically realized in gravity by generic Einstein-Axion-Dilaton systems. In the vacuum our solutions describe RG flows from a conformal field theory in the UV to generic scaling solutions in the IR with generic hyperscaling violation and dynamical exponents $\theta$ and $z$. We formulate a generalization of the holographic c-theorem to the anisotropic case. At finite temperature, we discover that the anisotropic deformation reduces the confinement-deconfinement phase transition temperature suggesting a possible alternative explanation of inverse magnetic catalysis solely based on anisotropy. We also study transport and diffusion properties in anisotropic theories and observe in particular that the butterfly velocity that characterizes both diffusion and growth of chaos transverse to the anisotropic direction, saturates a constant value in the IR which can exceed the bound given by the conformal value.