Charged AdS Black Holes and Catastrophic Holography

We compute the properties of a class of charged black holes in anti-de Sitter space-time, in diverse dimensions. These black holes are solutions of consistent Einstein-Maxwell truncations of gauged supergravities, which are shown to arise from the inclusion of rotation in the transverse space. We uncover rich thermodynamic phase structures for these systems, which display classic critical phenomena, including structures isomorphic to the van der Waals-Maxwell liquid-gas system. In that case, the phases are controlled by the universal `cusp' and `swallowtail' shapes familiar from catastrophe theory. All of the thermodynamics is consistent with field theory interpretations via holography, where the dual field theories can sometimes be found on the world volumes of coincident rotating branes.Comment: 19 pages, revtex, psfig, 6 multicomponent figures, typos, references and a few remarks have been repaired, and adde

A Maxwell-vector p-wave holographic superconductor in a particular background AdS black hole metric

We study the p-wave holographic superconductor for AdS black holes with planar event horizon topology for a particular Lovelock gravity, in which the action is characterized by a self-interacting scalar field nonminimally coupled to the gravity theory which is labeled by an integer $k$. As the Lovelock theory of gravity is the most general metric theory of gravity based on the fundamental assumptions of general relativity, it is a desirable theory to describe the higher dimensional spacetime geometry. The present work is devoted to studying the properties of the p-wave holographic superconductor by including a Maxwell field which nonminimally couples to a complex vector field in a higher dimensional background metric. In the probe limit, we find that the critical temperature decreases with the increase of the index $k$ of the background black hole metric, which shows that a larger $k$ makes it harder for the condensation to form. We also observe that the index $k$ affects the conductivity and the gap frequency of the holographic superconductors.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

On Stringy Thresholds in SYM/AdS Thermodynamics

We consider aspects of the role of stringy scales and Hagedorn temperatures in the correspondence between various field theories and AdS-type spaces. The boundary theory is set on a toroidal world-volume to enable small scales to appear in the supergravity backgrounds also for low field-theory temperatures. We find that thermodynamical considerations tend to favour background manifolds with no string-size characteristic scales. The gravitational dynamics censors the reliable exposure of Hagedorn physics on the supergravity side, and the system does not allow the study of the Hagedorn scale by low-temperature field theories. These results are obtained following some heuristic assumptions on the character of stringy modifications to the gravitational backgrounds. A rich phenomenology appears on the supergravity side, with different string backgrounds dominating in different regions, which should have field-theoretic consequences. Six-dimensional world volumes turn out to be borderline cases from several points of view. For lower dimensional world-volumes, a fully holographic behaviour is exhibited to order 1/N^2, and open strings in their presence are found to have a thermodynamical Hagedorn behaviour similar to that of closed strings in flat space.Comment: 49 pages, harvmac, seven Postscript figure

Mimicking the QCD equation of state with a dual black hole

We present numerical and analytical studies of the equation of state of translationally invariant black hole solutions to five-dimensional gravity coupled to a single scalar. As an application, we construct a family of black holes that closely mimics the equation of state of quantum chromodynamics at zero chemical potential.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figure