Spontaneous fragmentation of topological black holes

We study the metastability of Anti-de Sitter topological black holes with compact hyperbolic horizons. We focus on the five-dimensional case, an AdS/CFT dual to thermal states in the maximally supersymmetric large-N Yang-Mills theory, quantized on a three-dimensional compact hyperboloid. We estimate the various rates for quantum-statistical D3-brane emission, using WKB methods in the probe-brane approximation, including thermal tunneling and Schwinger pair production. The topological black holes are found to be metastable at high temperature. At low temperatures, D-branes are emitted without exponential suppression in superradiant modes, producing an instability in qualitative agreement with expectations from weakly-coupled gauge dynamics.