Hovering Black Holes from Charged Defects

TL;DR

This paper constructs a holographic model of localized charged defects in a conformal field theory, revealing a new phase with a hovering black hole and analyzing its properties and universal entropy behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a novel holographic dual for charged defects, demonstrating the formation of a hovering black hole as a second order phase transition.

Findings

Hovering black holes nucleate for large defect amplitudes.

Entropy exhibits universal behavior across different chemical potential profiles.

The phase transition is characterized as a second order quantum phase transition.

Abstract

We construct the holographic dual of an electrically charged, localised defect in a conformal field theory at strong coupling, by applying a spatially dependent chemical potential. We find that the IR behaviour of the spacetime depends on the spatial falloff of the potential. Moreover, for sufficiently localized defects with large amplitude, we find that a new gravitational phenomenon occurs: a spherical extremal charged black hole nucleates in the bulk: a hovering black hole. This is a second order quantum phase transition. We construct this new phase with several profiles for the chemical potential and study its properties. We find an apparently universal behaviour for the entropy of the defect as a function of its amplitude. We comment on the possible field theory implications of our results.