Thermal quenches in N=2* plasmas

Understand

We exploit gauge/gravity duality to study `thermal quenches' in a plasma of the strongly coupled N=2* gauge theory.

• Specifically, we consider the response of an initial thermal equilibrium state of the theory under variations of the bosonic or fermionic mass, to leading order in m/T<<1.
• When the masses are made to vary in time, novel new counterterms must be introduced to renormalize the boundary theory.
• We consider transitions the conformal super-Yang-Mills theory to the mass deformed gauge theory and also the reverse transitions.