Steady States, Thermal Physics, and Holography

Figure 3

A schematic presentation of a generic D-brane construction. A certain number of D-branes are placed on the tip of a cone, whose base could be a Sasaki-Einstein manifold (susy preserving), or simply an Einstein manifold (susy breaking). This picture assumes the cone is a six-dimensional manifold. This condition is not required and can be relaxed easily for other dimensional cases, at least, in principle. The red curves are strings beginning and ending on the stack of the D-branes, whose low energy limit can be captured by a standard gauge theory, similar to the SYM.