  Cavitation is a process where the viscous terms in a relativistic fluid
result in reducing the effective pressure, thus facilitating the nucleation of
bubbles of a stable phase. The effect is particularly pronounced in the
vicinity of a (weak) first-order phase transition. We use the holographic
correspondence to study cavitation in a strongly coupled planar cascading gauge
theory plasma close to the confinement/deconfinement phase transition. While in
this particular model the shift of the deconfinement temperature due to
cavitation does not exceed 5%, we speculate that cavitation might be important
near the QCD critical point.
