Hovering Black Holes from Charged Defects Seminar

We construct the holographic dual of an electrically charged, localised defect in a conformal field theory at strong coupling. In so doing, we find that the theory can sometimes flow to new IR fixed points. For an impurity with sufficiently large amplitude, we find that a new gravitational phenomenon occurs: a spherical extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black hole nucleates in the bulk - a hovering black hole. This is a second order quantum phase transition. We construct this new phase with several profiles for the chemical potential and study its properties. We find an apparently universal curve for the entropy of the defect as a function of its amplitude. We comment on the possible field theory implications of our results.