Black funnels and droplets in thermal equilibrium

Understand

It has recently been proposed that the strong coupling behaviour of quantum field theories on a non-dynamical black hole background can be described, in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, by a competition between two gravity duals: a black funnel and a black droplet.

• We present here thermal equilibrium solutions which represent such spacetimes, providing the first example where the thermal competition between the gravity duals can be studied.
• The solutions correspond to a special family of charged AdS C-metrics.
• We compute the corresponding Euclidean actions and find that the black funnel always dominates the canonical ensemble in our example, meaning that the field theory does not undergo a phase transition.