Electrified plasma in AdS/CFT correspondence

TL;DR

This paper constructs new time-dependent gravity solutions in AdS/CFT that model a plasma under a constant electric field, revealing how the system heats up and modifies fundamental symmetries.

Contribution

It introduces analytic, time-dependent AdS solutions with full back-reaction to model electrically driven plasma heating, including holographic renormalization and anomaly effects.

Findings

Derived analytic solutions up to next-leading order.

Performed holographic renormalization including full back-reactions.

Identified modifications to Ward identities due to U(1) symmetry and anomalies.

Abstract

We construct new gravity backgrounds holographic dual to neutral plasma with U(1) global symmetry in the presence of constant electric field, considering its full back-reactions to the metric. As the electric field and the induced current cause a net energy in-flow to the system, the plasma is continually heated up and the corresponding gravity solution has an expanding horizon. After proposing a consistent late-time expansion scheme, we present analytic solutions in the scheme up to next-leading order, and our solutions are new time-dependent solutions of 5D asymptotic AdS Einstein-Maxwell(-Chern-Simons) theory. To extract dual CFT stress tensor and U(1) current from the solutions, we perform a rigorous holographic renormalization of Einstein-Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory including full back-reactions, which can in itself be an interesting addition to literatures. As by-products, we obtain interesting modifications of energy-momentum/current Ward identities due to the U(1) symmetry and its triangle anomaly.