Shear viscosity of CFT plasma at finite coupling

We present evidence for the universality of the shear viscosity of conformal gauge theory plasmas beyond infinite coupling. We comment of subtleties of computing the shear viscosity in effective models of gauge/gravity correspondence rather than in string theory.     

Parton saturation at strong coupling from AdS/CFT

I describe the parton picture at strong coupling emerging from the gauge/gravity duality, with emphasis on the universality of the phenomenon of parton saturation. I discuss several consequences of this picture for the phenomenology of a strongly coupled quark–gluon plasma, which are potentially relevant for heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC.     

Liouville mode in gauge/gravity duality

We establish solutions corresponding to AdS\(_4\) static charged black holes with inhomogeneous two-dimensional horizon surfaces of constant curvature. Depending on the choice of the 2D constant curvature space, the metric potential of the internal geometry of the horizon satisfies the elliptic wave/elliptic Liouville equations. We calculate the charge diffusion and transport coefficients in the hydrodynamic limit of gauge/gravity duality and observe the exponential suppression in the diffusion coefficient and in the shear viscosity-per-entropy density ratio in the presence of an inhomogeneity on black hole horizons with planar, spherical, and hyperbolic geometry. We discuss the subtleties of the approach developed for a planar black hole with inhomogeneity distribution on the horizon surface in more detail and find, among others, a trial distribution function, which generates values of the shear viscosity-per-entropy density ratio falling within the experimentally relevant range. The solutions obtained are also extended to higher-dimensional AdS space. We observe two different DC conductivities in 4D and higher-dimensional effective strongly coupled dual media and formulate conditions under which the appropriate ratio of different conductivities is qualitatively the same as that observed in an anisotropic strongly coupled fluid. We briefly discuss ways of how the Liouville field could appear in condensed matter physics and outline prospects of further employing the gauge/gravity duality in CMP problems.     

Small amplitude forced fluid dynamics from gravity at T=0

The usual derivative expansion of gravity duals of charged fluid dynamics is known to break down in the zero temperature limit. In this case, fluid–gravity duality is not understood precisely. We explore this problem for a zero temperature charged fluid driven by a low frequency, small amplitude and spatially homogeneous external force. In the gravity dual, this corresponds to a time dependent boundary value of the dilaton. We calculate the bulk solution for the dilaton and the leading back reaction to the metric and the gauge fields using the modified low frequency expansion of Faulkner et al. (arXiv:0907.2694 [hep-th]). The resulting solutions are regular everywhere, establishing fluid–gravity duality to this order.     

Quasinormal spectrum and the black hole membrane paradigm

The membrane paradigm approach to black hole physics introduces the notion of a stretched horizon as a fictitious time-like surface endowed with physical characteristics such as entropy, viscosity and electrical conductivity. We show that certain properties of the stretched horizons are encoded in the quasinormal spectrum of black holes. We compute analytically the lowest quasinormal frequency of a vector-type perturbation for a generic black hole with a translationally invariant horizon (black brane) in terms of the background metric components. The resulting dispersion relation is identical to the one obtained in the membrane paradigm treatment of the diffusion on stretched horizons. Combined with the Buchel–Liu universality theorem for the membrane's diffusion coefficient, our result means that in the long wavelength limit the black brane spectrum of gravitational perturbations exhibits a universal, purely imaginary quasinormal frequency. In the context of gauge–gravity duality, this provides yet another (third) proof of the universality of shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in theories with gravity duals.     

AdS/Deep-Learning made easy: simple examples

Deep learning has been widely and actively used in various research areas.Recently,in gauge/gravity duality,a new deep learning technique called AdS/DL(Deep Learning) has been proposed.The goal of this paper is to explain the essence of AdS/DL in the simplest possible setups,without resorting to knowledge of gauge/gravity duality.This perspective will be useful for various physics problems:from the emergent spacetime as a neural network to classical mechanics problems.For prototypical examples,we choose simple classical mechanics problems.This method is slightly different from standard deep learning techniques in the sense that we not only have the right final answers but also obtain physical understanding of learning parameters.     

The shear diffusion coefficient for generalized theories of gravity

Near the horizon of a black brane in Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space and near the AdS boundary, the long-wavelength fluctuations of the metric exhibit hydrodynamic behaviour. The gauge–gravity duality then relates the boundary hydrodynamics for generalized gravity to that of gauge theories with large finite values of 't Hooft coupling. We discuss, for this framework, the hydrodynamics of the shear mode in generalized theories of gravity in d+1$d+1$ dimensions. It is shown that the shear diffusion coefficients of the near-horizon and boundary hydrodynamics are equal and can be expressed in a form that is purely local to the horizon. We find that the Einstein-theory relation between the shear diffusion coefficient and the shear viscosity to entropy ratio is modified for generalized gravity theories: Both can be explicitly written as the ratio of a pair of polarization-specific gravitational couplings but implicate differently polarized gravitons. Our analysis is restricted to the shear-mode fluctuations for simplicity and clarity; however, our methods can be applied to the hydrodynamics of all gravitational and matter fluctuation modes.     

Gauge/string duality in confining theories

This is the content of a set of lectures given at the “XIII Jorge André Swieca Summer School on Particles and Fields”, Campos do Jordão, Brazil in January 2005. They intend to be a basic introduction to the topic of gauge/gravity duality in confining theories. We start by reviewing some key aspects of the low energy physics of non‐Abelian gauge theories. Then, we present the basics of the AdS/CFT correspondence and its extension both to gauge theories in different spacetime dimensions with sixteen supercharges and to more realistic situations with less supersymmetry. We discuss the different options of interest: placing D–branes at singularities and wrapping D–branes in calibrated cycles of special holonomy manifolds. We finally present an outline of a number of non‐perturbative phenomena in non‐Abelian gauge theories as seen from supergravity.     

New massive gravity and AdS(4) counterterms

We show that the recently proposed Dirac-Born-Infeld extension of new massive gravity emerges naturally as a counterterm in four-dimensional anti-de Sitter space (AdS(4)). The resulting on-shell Euclidean action is independent of the cutoff at zero temperature. We also find that the same choice of counterterm gives the usual area law for the AdS(4) Schwarzschild black hole entropy in a cutoff-independent manner. The parameter values of the resulting counterterm action correspond to a c=0 theory in the context of the duality between AdS(3) gravity and two-dimensional conformal field theory. We rewrite this theory in terms of the gauge field that is used to recast 3D gravity as a Chern-Simons theory.     

Internal gauge symmetries and the gravitational field

It is shown that gravitationlike gauge fields can result from compact, internal symmetry groups. In particular, when the global duality invariance of the vacuum Maxwell's equations is made into a local symmetry using the methods of Yang and Mills, the gauge field is found to have certain properties characteristic of gravity. It is conjectured that a realistic theory of gravity can be constructed as a gauge theory based on a compact, internal symmetry group.     

Introduction to Nonperturbative 2D Quantum Gravity

We give an elementary introduction to the theory of matrix models, as applied to the study of 2 D quantum gravity. Starting from the sum over surfaces, we explain carefully the steps leading to the non-perturbative solution: discretization, duality, diagram-counting techniques, 1/N expansion, double-scaling limit, etc. Many examples are worked out in detail, and a pedagogical discussion of the concepts of universality and the non-perturbative ambiguity is presented.     

Parton branching and medium-induced radiation in a strongly coupled plasma

I review the parton picture at strong coupling emerging from the gauge/gravity duality together with its consequences for the energy loss and momentum broadening of a heavy quark moving through a strongly coupled plasma.     

Color dual form for gauge-theory amplitudes

Recently a duality between color and kinematics has been proposed, exposing a new unexpected structure in gauge theory and gravity scattering amplitudes. Here we propose that the relation goes deeper, allowing us to reorganize amplitudes into a form reminiscent of the standard color decomposition in terms of traces over generators, but with the role of color and kinematics swapped. By imposing additional conditions similar to Kleiss-Kuijf relations between partial amplitudes, the relationship between the earlier form satisfying the duality and the current one is invertible. We comment on extensions to loop level.     

Advances on tensor network theory: symmetries,fermions, entanglement,and holography

This is a short review on selected theory developments on tensor network (TN) states for strongly correlated systems. Specifically, we briefly review the effect of symmetries in TN states, fermionic TNs, the calculation of entanglement Hamiltonians from projected entangled pair states (PEPS), and the relation between the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) and the AdS/CFT or gauge/gravity duality. We stress the role played by entanglement in the emergence of several physical properties and objects through the TN language. Some recent results along these lines are also discussed.     

A new approach to the study of effective string corrections in LGTs

We propose a new approach to the study of the interquark potential in Lattice Gauge Theories. Instead of looking at the expectation value of Polyakov loop correlators we study the modifications induced in the chromoelectric flux by the presence of the Polyakov loops. In abelian LGTs, thanks to duality, this study can be performed in a very efficient way, allowing to reach high precision at a reasonable CPU cost. The major advantage of this strategy is that it allows us to eliminate the dominant effective string correction to the interquark potential (the Lüscher term) thus giving an unique opportunity to test higher order corrections. Performing a set of simulations in the 3d spin Ising model and then translating the result in the 3d gauge Ising model using duality, we were thus able to precisely identify and measure both the quartic and the sextic effective string corrections to the interquark potential. While the quartic term perfectly agrees with the Nambu–Goto one the sextic term is definitely different. Our result seems to disagree with the recent proof of the universality of the sextic correction. We discuss a few possible explanations of this disagreement.     

Holography of massive M2-brane theory: non-linear extension

We investigate the gauge/gravity duality between the \(\mathcal{N} = 6\) mass-deformed ABJM theory with \(\hbox {U}_k(N)\times \hbox {U}_{-k}(N)\) gauge symmetry and the 11-dimensional supergravity on LLM geometries with SO(2,1)\(\times \)SO(4)/\({\mathbb {Z}}_k\) \(\times \)SO(4)/\({\mathbb {Z}}_k\) isometry, in terms of a KK holography, which involves quadratic order field redefinitions. We establish the quadratic order KK mappings for various gauge invariant fields in order to obtain the canonical 4-dimensional gravity equations of motion and to reduce the LLM solutions to an asymptotically AdS\(_4\) gravity solutions. The non-linearity of the KK maps indicates that we can observe the true purpose of the non-linear KK holography of the LLM solutions. We read the vacuum expectation value of conformal dimension two operator from the asymptotically AdS\(_4\) gravity solutions. For the LLM solutions which are represented by square-shaped Young diagrams, we compare the vacuum expectation value obtained from the holographic procedure with the result obtained from the field theory, which is given by \(\langle \mathcal{O}^{(\Delta =2)}\rangle =\sqrt{k}N^{\frac{3}{2}}f_{(\Delta =2)}+\mathcal{O}(N)\), where \(f_{\Delta }\) is independent of N. Based on this result, we examine the gauge/gravity duality in the large N limit and finite k. We also show that the vacuum expectation values of the massive KK graviton modes are vanishing as expected by the supersymmetry.     

Critical dynamics of superconductors in the charged regime

We investigate the finite temperature critical dynamics of three-dimensional superconductors in the charged regime, described by a transverse gauge field coupling to the superconducting order parameter. Assuming relaxational dynamics for both the order parameter and the gauge fields, within a dynamical renormalization group scheme, we find a new dynamic universality class characterized by a finite fixed point ratio between the transport coefficients associated with the order parameter and gauge fields, respectively. We find signatures of this universality class in various measurable physical quantities, and in the existence of a universal amplitude ratio formed by a combination of physical quantities.