Steady States, Thermal Physics, and Holography

Abstract

It is well known that a Rindler observer measures a nontrivial energy flux, resulting in a thermal description in an otherwise Minkowski vacuum. For systems consisting of large number of degrees of freedom, it is natural to isolate a small subset of them and engineer a steady state configuration in which these degrees of freedom act as Rindler observers. In Holography, this idea has been explored in various contexts, specifically in exploring the strongly coupled dynamics of a fundamental matter sector, in the background of adjoint matters. In this article, we briefly review some features of this physics, ranging from the basic description of such configurations in terms of strings and branes, to observable effects of this effective thermal description.