Electric field quench in AdS/CFT

An electric field quench, a suddenly applied electric field, can induce nontrivial dynamics in confining systems which may lead to thermalization as well as a deconfinement transition. In order to analyze this nonequilibrium transitions, we use the AdS/CFT correspondence for N = 2 supersymmetric QCD that has a confining meson sector. We find that the electric field quench causes the deconfinement transition even when the magnitude of the applied electric field is smaller than the critical value for the static case (which is the QCD Schwinger limit for quark-antiquark pair creation). The time dependence is crucial for this phenomenon, and the gravity dual explains it as an oscillation of a D-brane in the bulk AdS spacetime. Interestingly, the deconfinement time takes only discrete values as a function of the magnitude of the electric field. We advocate that the new deconfinement phenomenon is analogous to the exciton Mott transition.