Towards the description of anisotropic plasma at strong coupling

TL;DR

This paper explores the properties of anisotropic plasma at strong coupling using AdS/CFT, constructing a dual geometry to analyze fluctuations and their directional dependence, revealing significant differences in damping behavior.

Contribution

It introduces an exact dual geometry for anisotropic plasma at strong coupling and analyzes fluctuation dynamics, highlighting directional effects on dispersion relations.

Findings

Dispersion relation depends on wave-vector direction.

Anisotropic plasma exhibits different damping behaviors.

No explicit instabilities found at the studied order.

Abstract

We initiate a study of anisotropic plasma at strong coupling using the AdS/CFT correspondence. We construct an exact dual geometry which represents a static uniform but anisotropic system and find, that although it is singular, it allows for a notion of `incoming' boundary conditions. We study small fluctuations around this background and find that the dispersion relation depends crucially on the direction of the wave-vector relative to the shape of the anisotropy reminiscent of similar behaviour at weak coupling. We do not find explicit instabilities to the considered order but only a huge difference in the damping behaviour.