Stability of string configurations dual to quarkonium states in AdS/CFT

We extend our earlier work, regarding the perturbative stability of string configurations used for computing the interaction potential of heavy quarks within the gauge/gravity correspondence, to cover a more general class of gravity duals. We provide results, mostly based on analytic methods and corroborated by numerical calculations, which apply to strings in a general class of backgrounds that encompass boosted, spinning and marginally-deformed D3-brane backgrounds. For the case of spinning branes we demonstrate in a few examples that perturbative stability of strings may require strong conditions complementing those following by thermodynamic stability of the dual field theories. For marginally-deformed backgrounds, we find that even in the conformal case stability requires an upper value for the imaginary part a of the deformation parameter, whereas in regions of the Coulomb branch where there exists linear confinement we find that there exist stable string configurations for certain ranges of values of the parameter sigma. We finally discuss the case of open strings with fixed endpoints propagating in Rindler space, which turns out to have an exact classical-mechanical analog. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.