D-Brane Instability as a Large N Phase Transition

Abstract

In AdS/CFT analyticity suggests that certain singular behaviors expected at large 't Hooft coupling should continue smoothly to weak 't Hooft coupling where the gauge theory is tractable. This may provide a window into stringy singularity resolution and is a promising technique for studying the signature of the black hole singularity discussed in hep-th/0306170. We comment briefly on its status. Our main goal, though, is to study a simple example of this technique. Gross and Ooguri (hep-th/9805129) have pointed out that the D-brane minimal surface spanning a pair of 't Hooft loops undergoes a phase transition as the distance between the loops is varied. We find the analog of this behavior in the weakly coupled Super Yang Mills theory by computing 't Hooft loop expectation values there.