Bifurcation of Plasma Balls and Black Holes to Lobed Configurations

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability of rotating plasma balls, dual to certain black holes, revealing a bifurcation to non-axisymmetric solutions and implications for black hole rotation limits in holographic models.

Contribution

It demonstrates the instability of rotating plasma balls against lobed perturbations, leading to new non-axisymmetric solutions and insights into black hole decay mechanisms within holographic duality.

Findings

Rotating plasma balls become unstable beyond a critical rotation rate.

Unstable modes lead to non-axisymmetric, peanut-like plasma configurations.

Results suggest a bound on black hole rotation in the dual gravitational theory.

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 AdS_5 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.