  Future facilities such as FAIR and NICA are expected to produce collisions of
heavy ions generating quark-gluon plasmas with large values of the quark
chemical potential; peripheral collisions in such experiments will also lead to
large values of the angular momentum density, associated with the internal
shearing motion of the plasma. It is well known that shearing motions in fluids
can lead to instabilities which cause a transition from laminar to turbulent
flow, and such instabilities in the QGP have recently attracted some attention.
We set up a holographic model of this situation by constructing a gravitational
dual system exhibiting an instability which is indeed triggered by shearing
angular momentum in the bulk. We show that holography indicates that the
transition to an unstable fluid happens more quickly as one scans across the
quark matter phase diagram towards large values of the chemical potential. This
may have negative consequences for the observability of quark polarization
effects.
