Pair creation of anti-de Sitter black holes on a cosmic string background

We analyze the quantum process in which a cosmic string breaks in an anti-de Sitter (AdS) background, and a pair of charged or neutral black holes is produced at the ends of the strings. The energy to materialize and accelerate the pair comes from the string tension. In an AdS background this is the only study done on the process of production of a pair of correlated black holes with spherical topology. The acceleration A of the produced black holes is necessarily greater than root\Lambda\/3, where Lambda<0 is the cosmological constant. Only in this case can the virtual pair of black holes overcome the attractive background AdS potential well and become real. The instantons that describe this process are constructed through the analytical continuation of the AdS C metric. Then we explicitly compute the pair creation rate of the process, and we verify that (as occurs with pair creation in other backgrounds) the pair production of nonextreme black holes is enhanced relative to the pair creation of extreme black holes by a factor of e(bh)(A)/4, where A(bh) is the black hole horizon area. We also conclude that the general behavior of the pair creation rate with the mass and acceleration of the black holes is similar in the AdS, flat and de Sitter cases, and our AdS results reduce to the ones of the flat case when Lambda-->0.