arXiv subjects

Mukund Rangamani

Publications and source records attributed to Mukund Rangamani.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

Cosmological Particle Production at Strong Coupling

We study the dynamics of a strongly-coupled quantum field theory in a cosmological spacetime using the holographic AdS/CFT correspondence. Specifically we consider a confining gauge theory in an expanding FRW universe and track the evolution of the stress-energy tensor during a period of expansion, varying the initial temperature as well as the rate and amplitude of the expansion. At strong coupling, particle production is inseparable from entropy production. As a result, we find significant qualitative differences from the weak coupling results: at strong coupling the system rapidly loses memory of its initial state as the amplitude is increased. Furthermore, in the regime where the Hubble parameter is parametrically smaller than the initial temperature, the dynamics is well modelled as a plasma evolving hydrodynamically towards equilibrium.

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arXiv2015

Positivity, negativity, and entanglement

We explore properties of the universal terms in the entanglement entropy and logarithmic negativity in 4d CFTs, aiming to clarify the ways in which they behave like the analogous entanglement measures in quantum mechanics. We show that, unlike entanglement entropy in finite-dimensional systems, the sign of the universal part of entanglement entropy is indeterminate. In particular, if and only if the central charges obey $a>c$, the entanglement across certain classes of entangling surfaces can become arbitrarily negative, depending on the geometry and topology of the surface. The negative contribution is proportional to the product of $a-c$ and the genus of the surface. Similarly, we show that in $a>c$ theories, the logarithmic negativity does not always exceed the entanglement entropy.

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arXiv2015

Entanglement structures in qubit systems

Using measures of entanglement such as negativity and tangles we provide a detailed analysis of entanglement structures in pure states of non-interacting qubits. The motivation for this exercise primarily comes from holographic considerations, where entanglement is inextricably linked with the emergence of geometry. We use the qubit systems as toy models to probe the internal structure, and introduce some useful measures involving entanglement negativity to quantify general features of entanglement. In particular, our analysis focuses on various constraints on the pattern of entanglement which are known to be satisfied by holographic sates, such as the saturation of Araki-Lieb inequality (in certain circumstances), and the monogamy of mutual information. We argue that even systems as simple as few non-interacting qubits can be useful laboratories to explore how the emergence of the bulk geometry may be related to quantum information principles.

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arXiv2015

Topological aspects of generalized gravitational entropy

The holographic prescription for computing entanglement entropy requires that the bulk extremal surface, whose area encodes the amount of entanglement, satisfies a homology constraint. Usually this is stated as the requirement of a (spacelike) interpolating surface that connects the region of interest and the extremal surface. We investigate to what extent this constraint is upheld by the generalized gravitational entropy argument, which relies on constructing replica symmetric q-fold covering spaces of the bulk, branched at the extremal surface. We prove (at the level of topology) that the putative extremal surface satisfies the homology constraint if and only if the corresponding branched cover can be constructed for every positive integer q. We give simple examples to show that homology can be violated if the cover exists for some values of q but not others, along with some other issues.

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arXiv2015

The eightfold way to dissipation

We provide a complete characterization of hydrodynamic transport consistent with the second law of thermodynamics at arbitrary orders in the gradient expansion. A key ingredient in facilitating this analysis is the notion of adiabatic hydrodynamics, which enables isolation of the genuinely dissipative parts of transport. We demonstrate that most transport is adiabatic. Furthermore, of the dissipative part, only terms at the leading order in gradient expansion are constrained to be sign-definite by the second law (as has been derived before).

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arXiv2015

Driven Holographic CFTs

We study the dynamical evolution of strongly coupled field theories, initially in thermal equilibrium, under the influence of an external driving force. We model the field theory holographically using classical gravitational dynamics in an asymptotically AdS spacetime. The system is driven by a source for a (composite) scalar operator. We focus on a scenario where the external source is periodic in time and chart out the response of several observables. We find an interesting phase structure in the response as a function of the amplitude of the source and driving frequency. Specifically the system transitions from a dissipation dominated phase, via a dynamical crossover to a highly resonant amplification phase. The diagnostics of these phases include the response of the operator in question, entropy production, energy fluctuations, and the temporal change of entanglement entropy for small subsystems. We comment on evidence for a potential phase transition in the energy fluctuations of the system.

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arXiv2015

Permutation orbifolds and holography

Two dimensional conformal field theories with large central charge and a sparse low-lying spectrum are expected to admit a classical string holographic dual. We construct a large class of such theories employing permutation orbifold technology. In particular, we describe the group theoretic constraints on permutation groups to ensure a (stringy) holographic CFT. The primary result we uncover is that in order for the degeneracy of states to be finite in the large central charge limit, the groups of interest are the so-called oligomorphic permutation groups. Further requiring that the low-lying spectrum be sparse enough puts a bound on the number of orbits of these groups (on finite element subsets). Along the way we also study familiar cyclic and symmetric orbifolds to build intuition. We also demonstrate how holographic spectral properties are tied to the geometry of covering spaces for permutation orbifolds.

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arXiv2015

Entanglement density and gravitational thermodynamics

In an attempt to find a quasi-local measure of quantum entanglement, we introduce the concept of entanglement density in relativistic quantum theories. This density is defined in terms of infinitesimal variations of the region whose entanglement we monitor, and in certain cases can be mapped to the variations of the generating points of the associated domain of dependence. We argue that strong sub-additivity constrains the entanglement density to be positive semi-definite. Examining this density in the holographic context, we map its positivity to a statement of integrated null energy condition in the gravity dual. We further speculate that this may be mapped to a statement analogous to the second law of black hole thermodynamics, for the extremal surface.

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arXiv2015

Comments on Hall transport from effective actions

We consider parity-odd transport in 2+1 dimensional charged fluids restricting attention to the class of non-dissipative fluids. We show that there is a two parameter family of such non-dissipative fluids which can be derived from an effective action, in contradistinction with a four parameter family that can be derived from an entropy current analysis. The effective action approach allows us to extract the adiabatic transport data, in particular the Hall viscosity and Hall conductivity amongst others, in terms of the thermodynamic functions that enter as 'coupling constants'. Curiously, we find that Hall viscosity is forced to vanish, whilst the Hall conductivity is generically a non-vanishing function of thermodynamic data determined in terms of the hydrodynamic couplings.

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arXiv2014

Hydrodynamic Regimes of Spinning Black D3-Branes

We present the long-wavelength effective description of non-extremal spinning black D3-branes in flat space. Our setup is motivated by recent explorations of low energy dynamics on black brane world-volumes within the blackfold approach and its connections to the fluid/gravity correspondence. The spinning D3-branes with a rigid radial Dirichlet cut-off give rise to an effective field theory. This theory describes a charged plasma which is driven by external forces, given by one vector and two scalar operators. Furthermore, the flavour charge of this plasma is anomalous, allowing us to examine features of anomaly-induced transport in the blackfold context. We calculate the hydrodynamic transport coefficients to first order and show that in the near-horizon limit, they reproduce the conformal charged fluid dynamics of ${\cal N}=4$ Super Yang-Mills theory. More generally the system interpolates smoothly between the blackfold, fluid/gravity, and Rindler fluid dynamics.

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arXiv2014

Causality & holographic entanglement entropy

We identify conditions for the entanglement entropy as a function of spatial region to be compatible with causality in an arbitrary relativistic quantum field theory. We then prove that the covariant holographic entanglement entropy prescription (which relates entanglement entropy of a given spatial region on the boundary to the area of a certain extremal surface in the bulk) obeys these conditions, as long as the bulk obeys the null energy condition. While necessary for the validity of the prescription, this consistency requirement is quite nontrivial from the bulk standpoint, and therefore provides important additional evidence for the prescription. In the process, we introduce a codimension-zero bulk region, named the entanglement wedge, naturally associated with the given boundary spatial region. We propose that the entanglement wedge is the most natural bulk region corresponding to the boundary reduced density matrix.

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arXiv2014

Comments on Entanglement Negativity in Holographic Field Theories

We explore entanglement negativity, a measure of the distillable entanglement contained in a quantum state, in relativistic field theories in various dimensions. We first give a general overview of negativity and its properties and then explain a well known result relating (logarithmic) negativity of pure quantum states to the Renyi entropy (at index $1/2$), by exploiting the simple features of entanglement in thermal states. In particular, we show that the negativity of the thermofield double state is given by the free energy difference of the system at temperature $T$ and $2\,T$ respectively. We then use this result to compute the negativity in the vacuum state of conformal field theories in various dimensions, utilizing results that have been derived for free and holographic CFTs in the literature. We also comment upon general lessons to be learnt about negativity in holographic field theories.

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arXiv2014

Quantum Channels in Quantum Gravity

The black hole final state proposal implements manifest unitarity in the process of black hole formation and evaporation in quantum gravity, by postulating a unique final state boundary condition at the singularity. We argue that this proposal can be embedded in the gauge/gravity context by invoking a path integral formalism inspired by the Schwinger-Keldysh like thermo-field double construction in the dual field theory. This allows us to realize the gravitational quantum channels for information retrieval to specific deformations of the field theory path integrals and opens up new connections between geometry and information theory.

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arXiv2014

Effective actions for anomalous hydrodynamics

We argue that an effective field theory of local fluid elements captures the constraints on hydrodynamic transport stemming from the presence of quantum anomalies in the underlying microscopic theory. Focussing on global current anomalies for an arbitrary flavour group, we derive the anomalous constitutive relations in arbitrary even dimensions. We demonstrate that our results agree with the constraints on anomaly governed transport derived hitherto using a local version of the second law of thermodynamics. The construction crucially uses the anomaly inflow mechanism and involves a novel thermofield double construction. In particular, we show that the anomalous Ward identities necessitate non-trivial interaction between the two parts of the Schwinger-Keldysh contour.

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arXiv2014

Non-dissipative hydrodynamics: Effective actions versus entropy current

While conventional hydrodynamics incorporating dissipative effects is hard to derive from an action principle, it is nevertheless possible to construct classical actions when the dissipative terms are switched off. In this note we undertake a systematic exploration of such constructions from an effective field theory approach and argue for the existence of non-trivial second order non-dissipative hydrodynamics involving pure energy-momentum transport. We find these fluids to be characterized by five second-order transport coefficients based on the effective action (a three parameter family is Weyl invariant). On the other hand since all flows of such fluids are non-dissipative, they entail zero entropy production; one can therefore understand them using the entropy current formalism which has provided much insight into hydrodynamic transport. An analysis of the most general stress tensor with zero entropy production however turns out to give a seven parameter family of non-dissipative hydrodynamics (a four parameter sub-family being Weyl invariant). The non-dissipative fluids derived from the effective action approach are a special case of the fluid dynamics constrained by conservation of the entropy current. We speculate on the reasons for the mismatch and potential limitations of the effective action approach.

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arXiv2014

Effective hydrodynamics of black D3-branes

The long-wavelength effective field theory of world-volume fluctuations of black D3-branes is shown to be a hydrodynamical system to leading order in a gradient expansion. We study the system on a fiducial `cutoff' surface: the fluctuating geometry imprints its dynamics on the surface via an induced stress tensor whose conservation encapsulates the hydrodynamical description. For a generic non-extremal D3-brane, as we move our cutoff surface from the asymptotically flat near-boundary region to the near-horizon region, this hydrodynamical system interpolates between a non-conformal relativistic fluid and a non-relativistic incompressible fluid. We also consider the dependence on the deviation from extremality of the D3-branes. In the near-extremal case we recover the description in terms of a conformal relativistic fluid encountered in the AdS/CFT context. We argue that this system allows us therefore to explore the various connections that have hitherto been suggested relating the dynamics of gravitational systems and fluid dynamics. In particular, we go on to show that the blackfold effective field theory approach allows us to capture this hydrodynamical behaviour and moreover subsumes the constructions encountered in the fluid/gravity correspondence and the black hole membrane paradigm, providing thereby a universal language to explore the effective dynamics of black branes.

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arXiv2014

Holographic thermal field theory on curved spacetimes

The AdS/CFT correspondence relates certain strongly coupled CFTs with large effective central charge $c_\text{eff}$ to semi-classical gravitational theories with AdS asymptotics. We describe recent progress in understanding gravity duals for CFTs on non-trivial spacetimes at finite temperature, both in and out of equilibrium. Such gravity methods provide powerful new tools to access the physics of these strongly coupled theories, which often differs qualitatively from that found at weak coupling. Our discussion begins with basic aspects of AdS/CFT and progresses through thermal CFTs on the Einstein Static Universe and on periodically identified Minkowski spacetime. In the latter context we focus on states describing so-called plasma balls, which become stable at large $c_\text{eff}$. We then proceed to out-of-equilibrium situations associated with dynamical bulk black holes. In particular, the non-compact nature of these bulk black holes allows stationary solutions with non-Killing horizons that describe time-independent flows of CFT plasma. As final a topic we consider CFTs on black hole spacetimes. This discussion provides insight into how the CFT transports heat between general heat sources and sinks of finite size. In certain phases the coupling to small sources can be strongly suppressed, resulting in negligible heat transport despite the presence of a deconfined plasma with sizeable thermal conductivity. We also present a new result, explaining how this so-called droplet behaviour is related to confinement via a change of conformal frame.

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arXiv2014

The Spectrum of Light States in Large N Minimal Models

$W_{N,k}$ minimal models possess an interesting class of `light' primaries which control much of the low energy density of states in the large $N$ 't Hooft limit. In this paper we conduct a detailed exploration of their distribution using a combination of numerical and analytical techniques. We also make some observations about the density of states of the full CFT. Our results appear to support the contention that there is no finite temperature analogue of the Hawking-Page transition in these systems.

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