Fragmentation of Spinning Branes

Abstract

The near-horizon geometries of the spinning D3-, M2- and M5-branes are examined by the probes immersed in a co-rotating frame. It is found that the geometries become unstable at critical values of the spin angular velocity by emitting the branes. We show that this instability corresponds to the metastability of the black hole systems and different from the known (local) thermodynamic instability. For the D3 case, the instability found here is in complete agreement with the known metastability of the N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory with R-symmetry chemical potentials.