Closed String Tachyons, AdS/CFT, and Large N QCD

We find that tachyonic orbifold examples of AdS/CFT have corresponding instabilities at small radius, and can decay to more generic gauge theories. We do this by computing a destabilizing Coleman-Weinberg effective potential for twisted operators of the corresponding quiver gauge theories, generalizing calculations of Tseytlin and Zarembo and interpreting them in terms of the large-N behavior of twisted-sector modes. The dynamically generated potential involves double-trace operators, which affect large-N correlators involving twisted fields but not those involving only untwisted fields, in line with large-N inheritance arguments. We point out a simple reason that no such small radius instability exists in gauge theories arising from freely acting orbifolds, which are tachyon-free at large radius. When an instability is present, twisted gauge theory operators with the quantum numbers of the large-radius tachyons aquire VEVs, leaving a gauge theory with fewer degrees of freedom in the infrared, analogous to but less extreme than ``decays to nothing'' studied in other systems with broken supersymmetry. In some cases one is left with pure glue QCD plus decoupled matter and U(1) factors in the IR, which we thus conjecture is described by the corresponding (possibly strongly coupled) endpoint of tachyon condensation in the M/String-theory dual.Comment: 28 pages, harvmac big. v2: references added; improved discussion of RG improvemen

Holographic turbulence

We construct turbulent black holes in asymptotically AdS_4 spacetime by numerically solving Einstein equations. Both the dual holographic fluid and bulk geometry display signatures of an inverse cascade with the bulk geometry being well approximated by the fluid/gravity gradient expansion. We argue that statistically steady-state black holes dual to d dimensional turbulent flows have horizons which are approximately fractal with fractal dimension D=d+4/3.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Holographic Vortex Liquids and Superfluid Turbulence

Superfluid turbulence, often referred to as quantum turbulence, is a fascinating phenomenon for which a satisfactory theoretical framework is lacking. Holographic duality provides a systematic new approach to studying quantum turbulence by mapping the dynamics of certain quantum theories onto the dynamics of classical gravity. We use this gravitational description to numerically construct turbulent flows in a holographic superfluid in two spatial dimensions. We find that the superfluid kinetic energy spectrum obeys the Kolmogorov -5/3 scaling law, as it does for turbulent flows in normal fluids. We trace this scaling to a direct energy cascade by injecting energy at long wavelengths and watching it flow to a short-distance scale set by the vortex core size, where dissipation by vortex annihilation and vortex drag becomes efficient. This is in sharp contrast with the inverse energy cascade of normal fluid turbulence in two dimensions. We also demonstrate that the microscopic dissipation spectrum has a simple geometric interpretation.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures. Minor corrections made. Movies and supplementary material available at http://turbulent.lns.mit.edu/Superflui