The Schwarzschild–black string AdS soliton: instability and holographic heat transport

We present a calculation of two-point correlation functions of the stress–energy tensor in the strongly coupled, confining gauge theory which is holographically dual to the AdS soliton geometry. The fact that the AdS soliton smoothly caps off at a certain point along the holographic direction ensures that these correlators are dominated by quasinormal mode contributions and thus show an exponential decay in position space. In order to study such a field theory on a curved spacetime, we foliate the six-dimensional AdS soliton with a Schwarzschild black hole. Via gauge/gravity duality, this new geometry describes a confining field theory with supersymmetry breaking boundary conditions on a non-dynamical Schwarzschild black hole background. We also calculate stress–energy correlators for this setting, thus demonstrating exponentially damped heat transport. This analysis is valid in the confined phase. We model a deconfinement transition by explicitly demonstrating a classical instability of Gregory–Laflamme-type of this bulk spacetime. (paper)