Phase transitions of an anisotropic N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma via holography

Abstract

Black hole solutions of type IIB supergravity were previously found that are dual to N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma with an anisotropic spatial deformation. In the zero temperature limit, these black holes approach a Liftshitz like scaling solution in the IR. It was recently shown that these black holes are unstable, and at low temperatures there is a new class of black hole solutions that are thermodynamically preferred. We extend this analysis, by considering consistent truncations of the Kaluza-Klein reduction of IIB supergravity on a five-sphere that preserves multiple scalar and U(1) gauge fields. We show that the previously constructed black holes become unstable at low temperatures, and construct new classes of exotic black hole solutions. We study the DC thermo-electric conductivity of these U(1) charged black holes, and find a diverging DC conductivity at zero temperature due to the divergence of the gauge field coupling.

Boomerang RG flows in M-theory with intermediate scaling

“…In general this will not be the case 7 and the solution will also contain a significant admixture of a solution with outgoing boundary conditions imposed at z = z 1 . To proceed, for the scaling region z 1 < z < z 2 we assume 8) and also demand that the potential satisfies…”

“…The Q-lattice constructions of this paper used a very specific global symmetry of the maximally supersymmetric N = 8 gauged supergravity theory. The 70 scalars of this theory parametrise the coset E 7(7) /SU (8) and we utilised a specific truncation that kept scalars parametrising two SL(2)/SO(2) factors in E 7(7) /SU (8). Furthermore, we exploited the fact that the scalar potential was invariant under SO(2) 2 and this was utilised to construct our Q-lattice ansatz.…”

“…The solutions we have constructed all have vanishing gauge-fields and are associated with vanishing charge density in the dual field theory. Some of the analogous type IIB anisotropic flows that we discussed in the introduction have been generalised to finite charge density in [8,38] using a straightforward consistent truncation. However, it is less clear how to add charge to the solutions that we have constructed with an isotropic metric in the spatial directions of the field theory.…”

Anisotropic plasmas from axion and dilaton deformations

“…For the particular case of X 5 = S 5 , associated with N = 4 Yang-Mills theory, it is known that the Lifshitz-like solution is unstable [12]. At finite temperature it was shown that the linear axion solutions have phase transitions [15,16] leading to new branches of solutions. It would be interesting to investigate whether similar instabilities and phase transitions occur for the τ -lattices we have constructed here.…”

Holographic spontaneous anisotropy

“…This in principle could lead to the observation of stars more compact than the ones allowed by isotropic matter, see, e.g., [3,4]. Strongly coupled anisotropic phases have been studied using holography in a variety of setups, including axionic/dilatonic sources [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], electric [21][22][23] and magnetic fields [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] or both [34][35][36][37][38], and p-wave superfluids [39][40][41][42][43][44]. Strongly coupled holographic matter has also been studied in the context of compact stars [45][46][47][48][49][...…”