The gravity dual of a p-wave superconductor

Steven S. Gubser, Silviu S. Pufu

Published 2008-05-19, updated 2008-08-28Version 2

We construct black hole solutions to the Yang-Mills equations in an AdS_4-Schwarzschild background which exhibit superconductivity. What makes these backgrounds p-wave superconductors is that the order parameter is a vector, and the conductivities are strongly anisotropic in a manner that is suggestive of a gap with nodes. The low-lying excitations of the normal state have a relaxation time which grows rapidly as the temperature decreases, consistent with the absence of impurity scattering. A numerical exploration of quasinormal modes close to the transition temperature suggests that p-wave backgrounds are stable against perturbations analogous to turning on a p+ip gap, whereas p+ip-wave configurations are unstable against turning into pure p-wave backgrounds.