An electric field quench, a suddenly applied electric field, can
induce nontrivial dynamics in confining systems which may
lead to thermalization as well as a deconfinement transition. In
order to analyze this nonequilibrium transitions,we use the
AdS/CFT
correspondence for N=2 supersymmetric QCD that
has a confining meson sector. We find that the electric field
quench causes the deconfinement transition even when the
magnitude of the applied electric field is smaller than the
critical value for the static
case (which is the QCD Schwinger
limit for quark-antiquark pair creation). The time dependence
is crucial for this phenomenon, and the gravity dual explains it
as the weakly turbulent instability of a D-brane in the bulk AdS
spacetime. Interestingly, the d
econfinement time takes only
discrete values as a function of the magnitude of the electric
field. We advocate that the new deconfinement phenomenon
is analogous to the exciton Mott transition.