Inverse magnetic catalysis in holographic models of QCD

We study the effect of magnetic field B on the critical temperature T c of the confinement-deconfinement phase transition in hard-wall AdS/QCD, and holographic duals of flavored and unflavored N=4 super-Yang Mills theories on R³× S¹ . For all of the holographic models, we find that T c (B) decreases with increasing magnetic field B ≪ T 2, consistent with the inverse magnetic catalysis recently observed in lattice QCD for B ≲ 1 GeV2. We also predict that, for large magnetic field B ≫ T 2, the critical temperature T c (B), eventually, starts to increase with increasing magnetic field B ≫ T 2 and asymptotes to a constant value.