The anisotropic N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma and its instabilities

Understand

We present a IIB supergravity solution dual to a spatially anisotropic finite-temperature N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma.

• The solution is static, possesses an anisotropic horizon, and is completely regular.
• The full geometry can be viewed as a renormalization group flow from an AdS geometry in the ultraviolet to a Lifshitz-like geometry in the infrared.
• The anisotropy can be equivalently understood as resulting from a position-dependent theta-term or from a non-zero number density of dissolved D7-branes.