  We show how two important types of phase transition in large N_c gauge theory
with fundamental flavours can be cast into the same classifying framework as
the meson-melting phase transition. These are quantum fluctuation induced
transitions in the presence of an external electric field, or a chemical
potential for R-charge. The classifying framework involves the study of the
local geometry of a special D-brane embedding, which seeds a self-similar
spiral structure in the space of embeddings. The properties of this spiral,
characterized by a pair of numbers, capture some key universal features of the
transition. Computing these numbers for these non-thermal cases, we find that
these transitions are in the same universality class as each other, but have
different universal features from the thermal case. We present a natural
generalization that yields new universality classes that may pertain to other
types of transition.
