Plasma-balls

PLASMA-BALLS IN LARGE N GAUGE THEORIES AND LOCALIZED BLACK HOLES (hep-th/0507219)

Ofer Aharony (Weizmann), Shiraz Minwalla (Harvard and TIFR), Toby Wiseman (Harvard)

Email: twiseman _at_ fas.harvard.edu

We show that in large N confining gauge theories which exhibit a first order confining-deconfining phase transition (eg. SYM) there exist a new class of stable gauge theory configurations, plasma-balls. These resemble a roughly homogenous bubble of deconfined `gluon' plasma, whose temperature in the interior of the bubble is close to the phase transition temperature. Furthermore, our analysis shows these bubbles are metastable, their decay being suppressed in the large N limit. At strong t'Hooft coupling these configurations are dual to black holes localized in the IR region of the dual gravity theory. In this paper we explicitly analyse these black hole solutions, and construct them numerically in a simple example. These are very novel black holes, which can have arbitrary mass, but whose temperature asymptotes, for large masses, to the deconfinement temperature.

The program code and associated mathematica notebooks for data visualization and finite differencing are downloadable below. The program has been commented, and is rather simple, but obviously some proficiency in C is required to understand it. We have made the code available to explicitly demonstrate the method given in the paper.

C program code to generate solutions

If you download the C code do email me, and give any feedback you have on it. Also bear in mind that there may well be much better ways to solve the system of equations than the elementary approach taken here. The intention in making the code public is simply to explicitly demonstrate the method, rather than provide any definitive resource.