A new phase for the anisotropic N=4 super Yang-Mills plasma

Understand

Black hole solutions of type IIB supergravity have been previously constructed that describe the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma with an anisotropic spatial deformation.

• The zero temperature limit of these black holes approach a Lifshitz-like scaling solution in the infrared.
• We show that these black holes become unstable at low temperature and we construct a new class of black hole solutions which are thermodynamically preferred.
• The phase transition is third order and incorporates a spontaneous breaking of the $SO(6)$ global symmetry down to $SO(4)\times SO(2)$.