Strongly Coupled Anisotropic Gauge Theories and Holography

We initiate a nonperturbative study of anisotropic, nonconformal, and confining gauge theories that are holographically realized in gravity by generic Einstein-axion-dilaton systems. In the vacuum, our solutions describe renormalization group flows from a conformal field theory in the UV to generic scaling solutions in the IR with generic hyperscaling violation and dynamical exponents θ 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.