Subtleties of non-Abelian D-brane actions and their effect on holographic heavy-light meson spectra

A bstract We revisit the holographic description of heavy-light mesons in the D3/D7 system at zero temperature, analyzing the dynamics of the coupled probe D7-branes through the non-Abelian Dirac-Born-Infeld action. Distinct quark masses are realized by separating the flavor branes, producing holographic flavor hierarchies. We refine the calculation made in previous works: we impose Hermiticity on the induced metric and fix the expansion of the determinant for matrix-valued fields. Implementing these improvements yields modified fluctuation equations and quantitatively different meson spectra: the scalar modes become heavier while the vector modes become lighter, removing the degeneracy reported in the literature. At finite ’t Hooft coupling, we also observe a qualitatively different dependence of the vector modes on the quark masses. The resulting prescription provides a consistent, broadly applicable framework for incorporating non-Abelian flavor dynamics into holographic models and can be readily extended to situations away from the vacuum.