Stability of Horava-Lifshitz black holes in the context of AdS/CFT

The anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence is a powerful tool that promises to provide new insights toward a full understanding of field theories under extreme conditions, including but not limited to quark-gluon plasma, Fermi liquid, and superconductor. In many such applications, one typically models the field theory with asymptotically AdS black holes. These black holes are subjected to stringy effects that might render them unstable. Horava-Lifshitz gravity, in which space and time undergo different transformations, has attracted attention due to its power-counting renormalizability. In terms of AdS/CFT correspondence, Horava-Lifshitz black holes might be useful to model holographic superconductors with Lifshitz scaling symmetry. It is thus interesting to study the stringy stability of Horava-Lifshitz black holes in the context of AdS/CFT. We find that uncharged topological black holes in lambda = 1 Horava-Lifshitz theory are nonperturbatively stable, unlike their counterparts in Einstein gravity, with the possible exceptions of negatively curved black holes with detailed balance parameter epsilon close to unity. Sufficiently charged flat black holes for epsilon close to unity, and sufficiently charged positively curved black holes with epsilon close to zero, are also unstable. The implication to the Horava-Lifshitz holographic superconductor is discussed.