English

Hovering Black Holes from Charged Defects

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-06-23 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We construct the holographic dual of an electrically charged, localised defect in a conformal field theory at strong coupling, by applying a spatially dependent chemical potential. We find that the IR behaviour of the spacetime depends on the spatial falloff of the potential. Moreover, for sufficiently localized defects with large amplitude, we find that a new gravitational phenomenon occurs: a spherical extremal charged black hole nucleates in the bulk: a hovering black hole. This is a second order quantum phase transition. We construct this new phase with several profiles for the chemical potential and study its properties. We find an apparently universal behaviour for the entropy of the defect as a function of its amplitude. We comment on the possible field theory implications of our results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1412.1830,
  title  = {Hovering Black Holes from Charged Defects},
  author = {Gary T. Horowitz and Nabil Iqbal and Jorge E. Santos and Benson Way},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.1830},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

43 pages, 18 figures; v2: minor clarifications, references added

R2 v1 2026-06-22T07:21:09.262Z