No Arabic abstract
The domain of outer communication of five-dimensional asymptotically flat stationary spacetimes may possess non-trivial 2-cycles (bubbles). Spacetimes containing such 2-cycles can have non-zero energy, angular momenta, and charge even in the absence of horizons. A mass variation formula has been established for spacetimes containing bubbles and possibly a black hole horizon. This `first law of black hole and soliton mechanics contains new intensive and extensive quantities associated to each 2-cycle. We consider examples of such spacetimes for which we explicitly calculate these quantities and show how regularity is essential for the formulae relating them to hold. We also derive new explicit expressions for the angular momenta and charge for spacetimes containing solitons purely in terms of fluxes supporting the bubbles.
We show that the leading semiclassical behavior of soliton form factors at arbitrary momentum transfer is controlled by solutions to a new wave-like integro-differential equation that describes solitons undergoing acceleration. We work in the context of two-dimensional linear sigma models with kink solitons for concreteness, but our methods are purely semiclassical and generalizable.
The AdS soliton is a nonsingular spacetime that has a flat conformal boundary with a compact $S^1$ direction. We find a horizonless cohomogeneity-1 metric that describes nonlinear gravitational oscillations of the AdS soliton in five dimensions. We call this spacetime the resonating AdS soliton. This solution is obtained as the nonlinear extension of normal modes of the AdS soliton dual to spin-2 glueball excitations. The boundary energy momentum tensor of the resonating AdS soliton has time periodic components, and it is interpreted as a coherently excited state in the dual field theory. Physical quantities of the resonating AdS soliton are multivalued at a fixed energy, suggesting a transition between different frequency solutions. The energy of the resonating AdS soliton is higher than that of the undeformed AdS soliton, in accordance with the positive energy conjecture proposed by Horowitz and Myers.
During defect-antidefect scattering, bound modes frequently disappear into the continuous spectrum before the defects themselves collide. This leads to a structural, nonperturbative change in the spectrum of small excitations. Sometimes the effect can be seen as a hard wall from which the defect can bounce off. We show the existence of these spectral walls and study their properties in the $phi^4$ model with BPS preserving impurity, where the spectral wall phenomenon can be isolated because the static force between the antikink and the impurity vanishes. We conclude that such spectral walls should surround all solitons possessing internal modes.
Consider at a finite temperature T a superfluid moving with a velocity v relative to the thermal bath or its normal component. From Landaus argument there exists a critical v_c (T) beyond which excitations can be spontaneously generated and the system becomes unstable. Identifying the final state induced by such an instability has been an outstanding open question. Using holographic duality we perform dynamical simulations of evolutions from initial unstable states, and find that the system settles to a homogenous superfluid state with a final velocity below the critical velocity. The dynamical evolution process appears to be highly chaotic, exhibiting transient turbulence. Nevertheless we are able to identify from the simulations a universal physical mechanism for the reduction of superfluid velocity, in terms of spontaneous nucleation of solitons. We also derive a simple analytic formula which relates the final velocity to the number of solitons nucleated during the evolution.
Large $N$ matrix quantum mechanics is central to holographic duality but not solvable in the most interesting cases. We show that the spectrum and simple expectation values in these theories can be obtained numerically via a `bootstrap methodology. In this approach, operator expectation values are related by symmetries -- such as time translation and $SU(N)$ gauge invariance -- and then bounded with certain positivity constraints. We first demonstrate how this method efficiently solves the conventional quantum anharmonic oscillator. We then reproduce the known solution of large $N$ single matrix quantum mechanics. Finally, we present new results on the ground state of large $N$ two matrix quantum mechanics.