Electric Field Quench, Equilibration and Universal Behavior

Abstract

We study electric field quench in N=2 strongly coupled gauge theory, using the AdS/CFT correspondence. To do so, we consider the aforementioned system which is subjected to a time-dependent electric field indicating an out of equilibrium system. Defining the equilibration time t_{eq}, at which the system relaxes to its final equilibrium state after injecting the energy, we find that the rescaled equilibriation time k^{-1}t_{eq} decreases as the transition time k increases. Therefore, we expect that for sufficiently large transition time, k ->infinity, the relaxation of the system to its final equilibrium can be an adiabatic process. On the other hand, we observe a universal behavior for the fast quenches, k << 1, meaning that the rescaled equilibration time does not depend on the final value of the time-dependent electric field. Our calculations generalized to systems in various dimensions also confirm universalization process which seems to be a typical feature of all strongly coupled gauge theories that admit a gravitational dual.