arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Christopher P. Herzog.
We study fermion correlators in a holographic superfluid with a d-wave (spin two) order parameter. We find that, with a suitable bulk Majorana coupling, the Fermi surface is anisotropically gapped. At low temperatures the gap shrinks to four nodal points. At high temperatures the Fermi surface is partially gapped generating four Fermi arcs.
We inspect the mass spectrum of heavy-light mesons in deformed N=2 super Yang-Mills theory using the AdS/CFT correspondence. We demonstrate how some of the degeneracies of the supersymmetric meson spectrum can be removed upon breaking the supersymmetry, thus leading to the emergence of hyperfine structure. The explicit SUSY breaking scenarios we consider involve on one hand tilting one of the two fundamental D7 branes inside the internal R^6 space, and on the other hand applying an external magnetic field on the (untilted) branes. The latter scenario leads to the well-known Zeeman effect, which we inspect for both weak and strong magnetic fields.
We find new black 3-brane solutions describing the "conifold gauge theory" at nonzero temperature and baryonic chemical potential. Of particular interest is the low-temperature limit where we find a new kind of weakly curved near-horizon geometry; it is a warped product AdS_2 x R^3 x T^{1,1} with warp factors that are powers of the logarithm of the AdS radius. Thus, our solution encodes a new type of emergent quantum near-criticality. We carry out some stability checks for our solutions. We also set up a consistent ansatz for baryonic black 2-branes of M-theory that are asymptotic to AdS_4 x Q^{1,1,1}.
We establish that in a large class of strongly coupled 3+1 dimensional N=1 quiver conformal field theories with gravity duals, adding a chemical potential for the R-charge leads to the existence of superfluid states in which a chiral primary operator of the schematic form O = λλ+ W condenses. Here λis a gluino and W is the superpotential. Our argument is based on the construction of a consistent truncation of type IIB supergravity that includes a U(1) gauge field and a complex scalar.
Four lectures on holography and the AdS/CFT correspondence applied to condensed matter systems. The first lecture introduces the concept of a quantum phase transition. The second lecture discusses linear response theory and Ward identities. The third lecture presents transport coefficients derived from AdS/CFT that should be applicable in the quantum critical region associated to a quantum phase transition. The fourth lecture builds in the physics of a superconducting or superfluid phase transition to the simple holographic model of the third lecture.
Superfluids support many different types of sound waves. We investigate the relation between the sound waves in a relativistic and a non-relativistic superfluid by using hydrodynamics to calculate the various sound speeds. Then, using a particular holographic scalar gravity realization of a strongly interacting superfluid, we compute first, second and fourth sound speeds as a function of the temperature. The relativistic low temperature results for second sound differ from Landau's well known prediction for the non-relativistic, incompressible case.
Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we calculate the transport coefficients of a strongly interacting system with a non-abelian SU(2) global symmetry near a second order phase transition. From the behavior of the poles in the Green's functions near the phase transition, we determine analytically the speed of second sound, the conductivity, and diffusion constants. We discuss similarities and differences between this and other systems with vector order parameters such as p-wave superconductors and liquid helium-3.
We embed a holographic description of a quantum field theory with Galilean conformal invariance in string theory. The key observation is that such field theories may be realized as conventional superconformal field theories with a known string theory embedding, twisted by the R-symmetry in a light-like direction. Using the Null Melvin Twist, we construct the appropriate dual geometry and its non-extremal generalization. From the nonzero temperature solution we determine the equation of state. We also discuss the hydrodynamic regime of these non-relativistic plasmas and show that the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio takes the universal value one over four pi typical of strongly interacting field theories with gravity duals.
It has been shown that a gravitational dual to a superconductor can be obtained by coupling anti-de Sitter gravity to a Maxwell field and charged scalar. We review our earlier analysis of this theory and extend it in two directions. First, we consider all values for the charge of the scalar field. Away from the large charge limit, backreaction on the spacetime metric is important. While the qualitative behaviour of the dual superconductor is found to be similar for all charges, in the limit of arbitrarily small charge a new type of black hole instability is found. We go on to add a perpendicular magnetic field B and obtain the London equation and magnetic penetration depth. We show that these holographic superconductors are Type II, i.e., starting in a normal phase at large B and low temperatures, they develop superconducting droplets as B is reduced.
The holographic description of Pomeron exchange in a strongly-coupled gauge theory with an AdS dual is extended to the case of two to three scattering. We study the production event of a central particle via hadron-hadron scattering in the double Regge kinematic regime of large center-of-momentum energy and fixed momentum transfer. The computation reduces to the overlap of a holographic wave function for the central particle with a source function for the Pomerons. The formalism is applied to scalar glueball production and the resulting amplitude is studied in various kinematic limits.
We show that a simple gravitational theory can provide a holographically dual description of a superconductor. There is a critical temperature, below which a charged condensate forms via a second order phase transition and the (DC) conductivity becomes infinite. The frequency dependent conductivity develops a gap determined by the condensate. We find evidence that the condensate consists of pairs of quasiparticles.
We use the AdS/CFT correspondence to compute the energy spectrum of heavy-light mesons in a N=2 SU(N) super Yang-Mills theory with two massive hypermultiplets. In the heavy quark limit, similar to QCD, we find that the excitation energies are independent of the heavy quark mass. We also make some remarks about related AdS/CFT models of flavor with less supersymmetry.
We study momentum relaxation due to dilute, weak impurities in a strongly coupled CFT, a truncation of the M2 brane theory. Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we compute the relaxation time scale as a function of the background magnetic field B and charge density ρ. The theory admits two different types of impurities. We find that for magnetic impurities, momentum relaxation due to the impurity is suppressed by a background B or ρ. For electric impurities, due to an underlying instability in the theory towards an ordered phase, the inverse relaxation time scale increases dramatically near \sqrt{B^2 + ρ^2/σ^2_0} \sim 21 T^2. We compute the Nernst response for the impure theory, and comment on similarities with recent measurements in superconductors.
In this paper we advance the program of using exceptional collections to understand the gauge theory description of a D-brane probing a Calabi-Yau singularity. To this end, we strengthen the connection between strong exceptional collections and fractional branes. To demonstrate our ideas, we derive a strong exceptional collection for every Y^{p,q} singularity, and also prove that this collection is simple.
We calculate the electrical and thermal conductivities and the thermoelectric coefficient of a class of strongly interacting 2+1 dimensional conformal field theories with anti-de Sitter space duals. We obtain these transport coefficients as a function of charge density, background magnetic field, temperature and frequency. We show that the thermal conductivity and thermoelectric coefficient are determined by the electrical conductivity alone. At small frequency, in the hydrodynamic limit, we are able to provide a number of analytic formulae for the electrical conductivity. A dominant feature of the conductivity is the presence of a cyclotron pole. We show how bulk electromagnetic duality acts on the transport coefficients.
We consider charge transport properties of 2+1 dimensional conformal field theories at non-zero temperature. For theories with only Abelian U(1) charges, we describe the action of particle-vortex duality on the hydrodynamic-to-collisionless crossover function: this leads to powerful functional constraints for self-dual theories. For the n=8 supersymmetric, SU(N) Yang-Mills theory at the conformal fixed point, exact hydrodynamic-to-collisionless crossover functions of the SO(8) R-currents can be obtained in the large N limit by applying the AdS/CFT correspondence to M-theory. In the gravity theory, fluctuating currents are mapped to fluctuating gauge fields in the background of a black hole in 3+1 dimensional anti-de Sitter space. The electromagnetic self-duality of the 3+1 dimensional theory implies that the correlators of the R-currents obey a functional constraint similar to that found from particle-vortex duality in 2+1 dimensional Abelian theories. Thus the 2+1 dimensional, superconformal Yang Mills theory obeys a "holographic self duality" in the large N limit, and perhaps more generally.
We argue that deconfinement in AdS/QCD models occurs via a first order Hawking-Page type phase transition between a low temperature thermal AdS space and a high temperature black hole. Such a result is consistent with the expected temperature independence, to leading order in 1/N_c, of the meson spectrum and spatial Wilson loops below the deconfinement temperature. As a byproduct, we obtain model dependent deconfinement temperatures T_c in the hard and soft wall models of AdS/QCD. Our result for T_c in the soft wall model is close to a recent lattice prediction.
We investigate some universal features of AdS/CFT models of heavy quark energy loss. In addition, as a specific example, we examine quark damping in the spinning D3-brane solution dual to N=4 SU(N_c) super Yang-Mills at finite temperature and R-charge chemical potential.