Unstable horizons and singularity development in holography

Understand

In holographic applications one can encounter scenarios where a long-wavelength instability can arise.

• In such situations, it is often the case that the dynamical end point of the instability is a new equilibrium phase with a nonlinear scalar hair condensate outside the black hole horizon.
• We here review holographic setups where symmetric horizons suffer from long-wavelength instabilities where a suitable equilibrium condensate phase does not exist.
• We study the dynamics of the simplest model in this exotic class, and show that it uncovers arbitrarily large curvatures in the vicinity of the horizon which asymptotically turn such region singular, at finite time with respect to the boundary theory.