Localized plasma balls

Abstract

In this paper we numerically construct localized black hole solutions in the IR end of the confining geometry of the AdS soliton, Witten's early holographic model for confinement. These black holes should be thought of as finite size analogues of the domain wall solutions that have appeared previously in the literature. From the dual CFT point of view, these black holes correspond to finite size balls of deconfined plasma surrounded by the confining vacuum. The plasma ball solutions are parametrized by the temperature. For temperatures well above the deconfinement transition, the dual black holes are small and round and they are well-described by the asymptotically flat Schwarzschild solution. On the other hand, as the temperature approaches the deconfinement temperature, these these black holes spread out in the directions parallel to IR end of the space-time, whilst their extent in the holographic radial direction remains finite. In these new black hole backgrounds, we compute various probes of confinement/deconfinement such as temporal Wilson loops and entanglement entropy. © 2014 The Author(s).