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 $$ \mathcal{N}=4 $$ super-Yang Mills theories on ℝ 3 × S 1 $$ {\mathbb{R}}^3\times {\mathrm{S}}^1 $$ . 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 GeV 2 . 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