Electric-field driven nonequilibrium phase transitions in AdS/CFT

Abstract

We study phase transitions and critical phenomena in nonequilibrium steady states controlled by an electric field. We employ the D3/D7 model in the presence of a charge density and electric field at finite temperatures. The system undergoes the first-order and the second-order phase transitions under the variation of the electric field in the presence of dissipation. We numerically find that the critical exponents which we define for the nonequilibrium phase transition in this model take the mean-field values.

Comments: 11 pages, 6 figures; v2:typos fixed, published in JHEP