Black funnels and droplets in thermal equilibrium

Abstract

It has recently been proposed that the strong coupling behaviour of quantum field theories on a non-dynamical black hole background can be described, in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, by a competition between two gravity duals: a black funnel and a black droplet. We present here thermal equilibrium solutions which represent such spacetimes, providing the first example where the thermal competition between the gravity duals can be studied. The solutions correspond to a special family of charged AdS C-metrics. We compute the corresponding Euclidean actions and find that the black funnel always dominates the canonical ensemble in our example, meaning that the field theory does not undergo a phase transition. © SISSA 2011.