Exact Gravitational Dual of a Plasma Ball

TL;DR

This paper provides an exact gravitational dual for a plasma ball in AdS/CFT, revealing detailed properties of the plasma configuration and its boundary geometry, and confirming previous conjectures.

Contribution

It introduces an exact solution for a black hole near an infrared wall in AdS, modeling a plasma ball in the dual CFT and analyzing its unique features.

Findings

The dual plasma is a finite-temperature disk of plasma surrounded by vacuum.

The solution exhibits a non-trivial boundary curvature and zero deconfinement temperature.

Surface tension of the plasma ball is estimated from the gravitational solution.

Abstract

We present an exact solution for a black hole localized near an infrared wall in four-dimensional anti-deSitter space. By computing the holographic stress tensor we show that the CFT dual of the black hole is a 2+1-dimensional ball (i.e., a disk) of plasma at finite temperature, surrounded by vacuum. This confirms some earlier conjectures about plasma balls in AdS/CFT. We also estimate the value of the surface tension for the ball. The solution displays a number of peculiarities, most notably a non-trivial curvature of the boundary geometry, as well as other properties associated to the vanishing deconfinement temperature of the set up. We discuss how these features are related to specific physics at the infrared and ultraviolet boundaries for this solution, and should not be generic properties of plasma balls.