Electric Field Quench in AdS/CFT

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a sudden electric field application induces deconfinement in a confining gauge theory via AdS/CFT, revealing a novel transition triggered by time-dependent effects even below static critical fields.

Contribution

It demonstrates a new deconfinement transition caused by electric field quenches, explained through D-brane oscillations in the holographic dual, distinct from static case predictions.

Findings

Electric field quench induces deconfinement below static critical field.

Deconfinement time is discretely quantized as a function of electric field.

The phenomenon is analogous to the exciton Mott transition.

Abstract

An electric field quench, a suddenly applied electric field, can induce nontrivial dynamics in confining systems which may lead to thermalization as well as a deconfinement transition. In order to analyze this nonequilibrium transitions,we use the AdS/CFT correspondence for $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetric QCD that has a confining meson sector. We find that the electric field quench causes the deconfinement transition even when the magnitude of the applied electric field is smaller than the critical value for the static case (which is the QCD Schwinger limit for quark-antiquark pair creation). The time dependence is crucial for this phenomenon, and the gravity dual explains it as an oscillation of a D-brane in the bulk AdS spacetime. Interestingly, the deconfinement time takes only discrete values as a function of the magnitude of the electric field. We advocate that the new deconfinement phenomenon is analogous to the exciton Mott transition.