Thermal photon production in a strongly coupled anisotropic plasma

Journal of High Energy Physics - For the homogeneous configuration given by the long string limit of the folded string with a spin in AdS 3 and a spin and a winding number in S 1, we solve the...     

Evidence for fast thermalization in the plane-wave matrix model

We report on a numerical simulation of the classical evolution of the plane-wave matrix model with semiclassical initial conditions. Some of these initial conditions thermalize and are dual to a black hole forming from the collision of D-branes in the plane-wave geometry. In particular, we consider a large fuzzy sphere (a D2-brane) plus a single eigenvalue (a D0 particle) going exactly through the center of the fuzzy sphere and aimed to intersect it. Including quantum fluctuations of the off-diagonal modes in the initial conditions, with sufficient kinetic energy the configuration collapses to a small size. We also find evidence for fast thermalization: rapidly decaying autocorrelation functions at late times with respect to the natural time scale of the system.     

Anisotropic N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma and its instabilities

We present a type-IIB supergravity solution dual to a spatially anisotropic finite-temperature N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma. The solution is static and completely regular. The full geometry can be viewed as a renormalization group flow from an ultraviolet anti-de Sitter geometry to an infrared Lifshitz-like geometry. The anisotropy can be equivalently understood as resulting from a position-dependent θ?term or from a nonzero number density of dissolved D7-branes. The holographic stress tensor is conserved and anisotropic. The presence of a conformal anomaly plays an important role in the thermodynamics. The phase diagram exhibits homogeneous and inhomogeneous (i.e., mixed) phases. In some regions the homogeneous phase displays instabilities reminiscent of those of weakly coupled plasmas. We comment on similarities with QCD at finite baryon density and with the phenomenon of cavitation.