Brane nucleation instabilities in non-AdS/non-CFT

Abstract

We speculate that the weak gravity conjecture applied to theories with holographic duals bans the existence of disordered phases at zero temperature. We test this idea by introducing a nonzero baryon chemical potential in a deformation of the SU (N c ) × SU (N c ) Klebanov-Witten gauge theory with broken supersymmetry and conformal invariance. At low temperature, a disordered phase dual to a black brane geometry is unstable for low chemical potentials and metastable for high values. In the metastable phase, states with a partial Higgsing of the gauge group are favored over the normal disordered phase. This is reflected in the properties of the effective potential for color branes in the dual geometry, where the appearance of a global minimum outside the horizon signals the onset of a brane nucleation instability. When the Higgsing involves only one of the group factors, the global minimum remains at a finite distance from the horizon, making it possible to construct holographic duals to metastable "color superconducting" states. We also consider branes dual to excitations with baryon charge, but find that the extremal geometry remains marginally stable against the emission of particles carrying baryon charge independently of the strength of the deformation. * oscar.henriksson@helsinki.fi † hoyoscarlos@uniovi.es ‡ niko.jokela@helsinki.fi

On the search for multicenter AdS black holes from M-theory

“…Third, for planar horizons we have found an instability towards nucleation of spacetime filling M2 branes. This is of the same form as in [43], where five-dimensional black branes in the conifold T 11 theory were found to be unstable towards the emission of spacetime filling D3 branes. In both cases this phase transition is triggered not by the baryonic charges, but by the R-symmetry.…”

“…First of all, one can notice that the hypermultiplets have dropped out from the expression of the mass, which depends solely on the vector multiplets scalars. Previous examples of probe computations (wrapped M2 branes on AdS 4 backgrounds of [29], and wrapped D3 branes on AdS 5 black branes discussed in [43]) also showed the same pattern. It is however surprising that this sector of the theory does not contribute to the mass term of the DBI action.…”

“…To end this section, let us mention that a similar instability driven by R-symmetry field was found in the case of spacetime-filling D3 branes in conifold truncations [43], and was interpreted as a color superconductor instability in which the rank of the group is changed with the expulsion of branes.…”

“…Let us parameterize the coordinates of the M2 branes with (τ, χ 1 , χ 2 ), all noncompact, ranging from −∞ to +∞. This section follows [43], where the possibility of D3 brane nucleation on black branes from the T 11 truncation is studied. We will stick to their notation to facilitate comparison between the two cases.…”

Quantum information probes of charge fractionalization in large-N gauge theories

“…Therefore, the spacetimes that we will consider herein are taken to be asymptotically AdS 4 . At low temperature, the charged AdS 4 black hole may undergo a "brane nucleation" instability by ejecting its charge to reach an energetically more favorable ground state [81,82]; in AdS/CFT context this instability has also been called the Fermi seasickness [33]. In other words, when the backreaction of bulk fermions is taken into account, the AdS 4 -Reissner-Nordström black hole is quantum mechanically unstable towards the formation of an electron cloud.…”