Quarks in an external electric field in finite temperature large N gauge theory

We use a ten dimensional dual string background to study aspects of the physics of large N four dimensional SU(N) gauge theory, where its fundamental quarks are charged under a background electric field. The theory is N = 2 supersymmetric for vanishing temperature and electric field. We work in a limit where the quarks do not back-react. At zero temperature, we observe that the electric field induces a phase transition associated with the dissociation of the mesons into their constituent quarks. This is an analogue of an insulator-metal transition, since the system goes from being an insulator with zero current (in the applied field) to a conductor with free charge carriers (the quarks). At finite temperature this phenomenon persists, and the dissociation transition becomes subsumed into the more familiar meson melting transition. Here, the dissociation phenomenon reduces the critical melting temperature.