Black branes dual to striped phases

TL;DR

This paper constructs inhomogeneous charged black branes in AdS space, revealing a second order phase transition to a striped phase with broken translation symmetry, and explores their properties at low temperatures.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical method to construct fully backreacted inhomogeneous black branes dual to striped phases at finite chemical potential.

Findings

Identifies a second order phase transition to inhomogeneous phases.

Demonstrates existence of striped solutions in certain models.

Analyzes properties of low-temperature states.

Abstract

We construct inhomogeneous charged black branes in AdS, holographically dual to a phase at finite chemical potential with spontaneously broken translation invariance in one direction. These are obtained numerically, solving PDEs for the fully backreacted system. Fixing the periodicity scale, we find a second order phase transition to the inhomogeneous phase. We comment on the properties of the state emerging at low temperatures. For some models we demonstrate the existence of a branch of striped solutions but no continuous phase transition.