Phases of holographic interfaces

Abstract

We compute the phase diagram of the simplest holographic bottom-up model of conformal interfaces. The model consists of a thin domain wall between three-dimensional Anti-de Sitter (AdS) vacua, anchored on a boundary circle. We distinguish five phases depending on the existence of a black hole, the intersection of its horizon with the wall, and the fate of inertial observers. We show that, like the Hawking-Page phase transition, the capture of the wall by the horizon is also a first order transition and comment on its field-theory interpretation. The static solutions of the domain-wall equations include gravitational avatars of the Faraday cage, black holes with negative specific heat, and an intriguing phenomenon of suspended vacuum bubbles corresponding to an exotic interface/anti-interface fusion. Part of our analysis overlaps with recent work by Simidzija and Van Raamsdonk but the interpretation is different.

Universal relations for holographic interfaces

“…The symmetries of the ICFT allow even the central charge to jump across the interface. This scenario has for example recently been studied in [30,40]. It is straightforward to adapt our techniques and results also to this case.…”

“…As recently pointed out in[30], a different route to reach a BCFT from the RS braneworld is to let the cosmological constant jump across the brane together with its geometric backreaction which leads to a jump in extrinsic curvature. This basically means the brane is charged under a 3-form flux in the 3d spacetime.…”

Negative energy enhancement in layered holographic conformal field theories

“…Our work complements this paper, in that we mainly focus on the higher-dimensional cases. In particular, the enhancement of negative energy that we find does not appear for 1+1 dimensional CFTs considered in [22]. It would be interesting, following [22] to extend our results to finite temperature in order to work out the phase diagrams more completely in the higher dimensional cases.…”

“…A detailed investigation of such holographic interface CFTs was recently carried out in [22] for both zero and finite temperature in the case of 1+1 dimensional CFTs. Our work complements this paper, in that we mainly focus on the higher-dimensional cases.…”

Conformal bootstrap near the edge

“…There are several similar (but different) holographic setups where a wedge plays a role. We find of note, the wedge holography between AdS d+1 and CFT d−1 of [56], the interface-type holography studied in [57,58] and others in the entanglement entropy literature [59][60][61]. For a more direct relation it would be interesting to construct a holographic setup dual to the wedge configuration.…”