Scalar mesons in holographic walking technicolor Original Research Article

We study the spectrum of scalar mesons in the holographic dual of walking technicolor, obtained by embedding image probe branes in a certain type IIB background. The scalar mesons arise from fluctuations of the probe techniflavor branes and complement the (axial-)vector meson spectra that we investigated in earlier work. By explicitly finding the spectrum of scalar masses, we show that the nonsupersymmetric image embedding is stable with respect to such fluctuations. Interestingly, it turns out that the mass splitting between the scalar and vector meson spectra is of subleading order in a small parameter expansion. It is noteworthy that this near-degeneracy may not be entirely due to a small amount of supersymmetry breaking and thus could indicate the presence of some other (approximate) symmetry in the problem.