Stability of strings dual to flux tubes between static quarks in N=4 SYM

Abstract

Computing heavy quark-antiquark potentials within the AdS/CFT correspondence often leads to behaviors that differ from what one expects on general physical grounds and field-theory considerations. To isolate the configurations of physical interest, it is of utmost importance to examine the stability of the string solutions dual to the flux tubes between the quark and antiquark. Here, we formulate and prove several general statements concerning the perturbative stability of such string solutions, relevant for static quark-antiquark pairs in a general class of backgrounds, and we apply the results to N=4 SYM at finite temperature and at generic points of the Coulomb branch. In all cases, the problematic regions are found to be unstable and hence physically irrelevant.

43 pages, 18 figures; v3: typos corrected

References in corpus (4)

• An AdS/CFT Calculation of Screening in a Hot Wind
• Holographic melting and related properties of mesons in a quark gluon plasma
• The Energy of a Moving Quark-Antiquark Pair in an N=4 SYM Plasma
• On the velocity and chemical-potential dependence of the heavy-quark interaction in N=4 SYM plasmas

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• Complex marginal deformations of D3-brane geometries, their Penrose limits and giant gravitons
• Spinning Dragging Strings
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• Aspects of open strings in Rindler Space
• On the internal space dependence of the static quark-antiquark potential in $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM plasma wind
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