Bifurcation of Plasma Balls and Black Holes to Lobed Configurations

Cardoso, Vitor and Dias, Oscar J.C. (2009) Bifurcation of Plasma Balls and Black Holes to Lobed Configurations. JHEP. (doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2009/04/125).

Abstract

At high energy densities any quantum field theory is expected to have an effective hydrodynamic description. When combined with the gravity/gauge duality an unified picture emerges, where gravity itself can have a formal holographic hydrodynamic description. This provides a powerful tool to study black holes in a hydrodynamic setup. We study the stability of plasma balls, holographic duals of Scherck-Schwarz (SS) AdS black holes. We find that rotating plasma balls are unstable against m-lobed perturbations for rotation rates higher than a critical value. This unstable mode signals a bifurcation to a new branch of non-axisymmetric stationary solutions which resemble a ``peanut-like'' rotating plasma. The gravitational dual of the rotating plasma ball must then be unstable and possibly decay to a non-axisymmetric long-lived SS AdS black hole. This instability provides therefore a mechanism that bounds the rotation of SS black holes. Our results are strictly valid for the SS AdS gravity theory dual to a SS gauge theory. The latter is particularly important because it shares common features with QCD, namely it is non-conformal, non-supersymmetric and has a confinement/deconfinement phase transition. We focus our analysis in 3-dimensional plasmas dual to SS AdS5 black holes, but many of our results should extend to higher dimensions and to other gauge theory/gravity dualities with confined/deconfined phases and admitting a fluid description.

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Contributors

Author: Oscar J.C. Dias

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