  We study the N = 4 theory at weak coupling, on a three sphere in the grand
canonical ensemble with R symmetry chemical potentials. We focus attention on
near critical values for the chemical potentials, above which the classical
theory has no ground state. By computing a one loop effective potential for the
light degrees of freedom in this regime, we show the existence of flat
directions of complex dimension N, 2N and 3N for one, two and three critical
chemical potentials respectively; these correspond to one half, one quarter and
one-eighth BPS states becoming light respectively at the critical values. At
small finite temperature we show that the chemical potentials can be continued
beyond their classical limiting values to yield a deconfined metastable phase
with lifetime diverging in the large N limit. Our low temperaure analysis
complements the high temperature metastability found by Yamada and Yaffe. The
resulting phase diagram at weak coupling bears a striking resemblance to the
strong coupling phase diagram for charged AdS black holes. Our analysis also
reveals subtle qualitative differences between the two regimes.
