Black Branes in a Box: Hydrodynamics, Stability, and Criticality

Abstract

We study the effective hydrodynamics of neutral black branes enclosed in a finite cylindrical cavity with Dirichlet boundary conditions. We focus on how the Gregory-Laflamme instability changes as we vary the cavity radius R. Fixing the metric at the cavity wall increases the rigidity of the black brane by hindering gradients of the redshift on the wall. In the effective fluid, this is reflected in the growth of the squared speed of sound. As a consequence, when the cavity is smaller than a critical radius the black brane becomes dynamically stable. The correlation with the change in thermodynamic stability is transparent in our approach. We compute the bulk and shear viscosities of the black brane and find that they do not run with R. We find mean-field theory critical exponents near the critical point.

23 pages, 3 figures. v2: added comments on first-order phase transition

References in corpus (4)

• Nonlinear Fluid Dynamics from Gravity
• Instabilities of Black Strings and Branes
• Derivation of the blackfold effective theory
• Causality and the AdS Dirichlet problem

Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Holographic Interpretation of Acoustic Black Holes
• Hawking--Page phase transitions of the black holes in a cavity
• Phase relaxation and pattern formation in holographic gapless charge density waves
• Hydrodynamic Regimes of Spinning Black D3-Branes
• Fluid/gravity correspondence: A nonconformal realization in compactified D4 branes
• Bulk Viscosity of dual Fluid at Finite Cutoff Surface via Gravity/Fluid correspondence in Einstein-Maxwell Gravity
• String Theory in a Pinch: Resolving the Gregory-Laflamme Singularity
• The Joule--Thomson and Joule--Thomson-like effects of the black holes in a cavity
• Compressible Fluids in the Membrane Paradigm: non-AdS Fluid/Gravity correspondences
• Sonic velocity in holographic fluids and its applications