Plasma-balls in large N gauge theories and localized black holes

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the existence of plasma-balls in large N gauge theories and proposes their dual description as localized black holes in gravity, providing new insights into black hole physics and gauge/gravity duality.

Contribution

It introduces plasma-balls in confining gauge theories and maps them to stable localized black holes in warped geometries, with numerical constructions and novel properties.

Findings

Plasma-balls are meta-stable lumps of gluon plasma above deconfinement energy.

Black holes dual to plasma-balls have temperature approaching a nonzero constant at large mass.

Small plasma-balls correspond to ten-dimensional Schwarzschild black holes.

Abstract

We argue for the existence of plasma-balls - meta-stable, nearly homogeneous lumps of gluon plasma at just above the deconfinement energy density - in a class of large N confining gauge theories that undergo first order deconfinement transitions. Plasma-balls decay over a time scale of order N^2 by thermally radiating hadrons at the deconfinement temperature. In gauge theories that have a dual description that is well approximated by a theory of gravity in a warped geometry, we propose that plasma-balls map to a family of classically stable finite energy black holes localized in the IR. We present a conjecture for the qualitative nature of large mass black holes in such backgrounds, and numerically construct these black holes in a particular class of warped geometries. These black holes have novel properties; in particular their temperature approaches a nonzero constant value at large mass. Black holes dual to plasma-balls shrink as they decay by Hawking radiation; towards the end of this process they resemble ten dimensional Schwarzschild black holes, which we propose are dual to small plasma-balls. Our work may find practical applications in the study of the physics of localized black holes from a dual viewpoint.