Disordered Charged Horizons
Abstract
We construct fully backreacted charged black brane solutions with a spatially disordered chemical potential in asymptotically AdS and AdS, providing holographic duals of strongly coupled disordered systems. At intermediate temperatures these geometries display highly inhomogeneous horizons, though their geometric averages reproduce the clean BTZ and Reissner-Nordstr\"om solutions. The low temperature behavior, however, differs sharply between dimensions. In AdS, inhomogeneities decay and the horizon flows to the clean charged BTZ fixed point, rendering disorder irrelevant in the infrared. In AdS, horizon inhomogeneities persist: while the averaged geometry flows to the clean AdS throat, the disordered horizon induces a finite residual resistivity. These results show that disorder can qualitatively alter the IR physics of holographic metals and indicate violations of the Harris criterion in strongly coupled systems.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.08164,
title = {Disordered Charged Horizons},
author = {Daniel Arean and Sebastian Grieninger and Pau G. Romeu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.08164},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
39 pages, 22 figures