Holographic striped phases

Abstract

We discuss new types of instabilities of D = 4 electrically charged AdSReissner-Nordström black branes that involve neutral pseudo-scalars. The instabilities spontaneously break translational invariance and are associated with the dual three-dimensional CFTs, at finite temperature and fixed chemical potential with respect to a global abelian symmetry, acquiring striped phases. We show that such instabilities are present for the infinite class of skew-whiffed AdS 4 ×SE 7 solutions of D = 11 supergravity, albeit at a lower temperature than the known superfluid instabilities.

A modulated shear to entropy ratio

“…This instability leads to a modulated phase where translation invariance in one of the spatial directions is broken. (The study of a three space-time dimensional analogue of this instability can be found in, for example, [44,45]. )…”

Black branes in flux compactifications

“…Field theory models of non Fermi liquids often have relevant operators and suffer from symmetry-breaking instabilities as the temperature is lowered. Similar issues are encountered in the gravity side, for instance with superconducting [21][22][23] or translation-breaking [24] instabilities. While these instabilities can lead to interesting broken phases, it is important to develop tools to stabilize symmetric…”

“…To establish this, it is important that KK modes decouple. There could also be inhomogeneous instabilities, like the one found in [24], but our analysis so far shows that there can be stable solutions [72].…”

Holographic flows to IR Lifshitz spacetimes

“…4 In summary, from solutions (19) and (20) we note that these TsT spacetimes supported by nontrivial string fields would have a Lifshitz (a = 3) or asymptotic Schroedinger symmetries (a = 2) depending upon the presence of B field in them. Particularly background (20) is a nontrivial solitonic configuration with B-field for which as we go from IR region to the UV region, it basically flows to a Schrödinger spacetime (with a = 2). The corresponding holographic dual will be a nonrelativistic CFT at zero temperature with suitable operater deformation giving rise to this flow.…”

“…These solutions require nontrivial dilaton field as well as metric deformations. Such solutions are further generalised in [20]. These recent Lifshitz solutions do avoid the early 'no-go' results of [24] because the field ansätze are some what less restrictive.…”