Towards the description of anisotropic plasma at strong coupling

Abstract

We initiate a study of anisotropic plasma at strong coupling using the AdS/CFT correspondence. We construct an exact dual geometry which represents a static uniform but anisotropic system and find, that although it is singular, it allows for a notion of `incoming' boundary conditions. We study small fluctuations around this background and find that the dispersion relation depends crucially on the direction of the wave-vector relative to the shape of the anisotropy reminiscent of similar behaviour at weak coupling. We do not find explicit instabilities to the considered order but only a huge difference in the damping behaviour.