We discuss nuclear physics in the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model, in the limit of large number Nc of colors and large 't Hooft coupling, with the addition of a finite mass for the quarks. In this limit the individual baryons are described by classical solitons whose size is much smaller than the typical distance at which they settle in a nuclear bound state.
Thus we can use the linear approximation to compute the interaction potential and provide a natural description for bound states. One of the interesting features that we find is that holographic nuclear physics provides a natural description for lightly bound states when λ is large.
We find the classical geometry of nuclear bound states for baryon numbers up to B=8. The effect of the finite pion mass is to decrease the binding energy of the nuclei with respect to the massless case. For the case of two nuclei, we also find the topology and metric of the manifold of zero modes and, quantizing it, we find that the ground state can be identified with the deuteron state. We discuss the relations with other methods in the literature used to study Skyrmions and holographic nuclear physics. We discuss 1/Nc and 1/λ corrections and the challenges to overcome to reach the phenomenological values to fit with real QCD.
We discuss the finite density case with a particular choice of a cubic lattice, for which we find the critical chemical potential, at which the hadronic phase transition occurs.