arXiv subjects

Richard A. Davison

Publications and source records attributed to Richard A. Davison.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

Dissecting holographic conductivities

The DC thermoelectric conductivities of holographic systems in which translational symmetry is broken can be efficiently computed in terms of the near-horizon data of the dual black hole. By calculating the frequency dependent conductivities to the first subleading order in the momentum relaxation rate, we give a physical explanation for these conductivities in the simplest such example, in the limit of slow momentum relaxation. Specifically, we decompose each conductivity into the sum of a coherent contribution due to momentum relaxation and an incoherent contribution, due to intrinsic current relaxation. This decomposition is different from those previously proposed, and is consistent with the known hydrodynamic properties in the translationally invariant limit. This is the first step towards constructing a consistent theory of charged hydrodynamics with slow momentum relaxation.

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arXiv2015

Incoherent transport in clean quantum critical metals

In a clean quantum critical metal, and in the absence of umklapp, most d.c. conductivities are formally infinite due to momentum conservation. However, there is a particular combination of the charge and heat currents which has a finite, universal conductivity. In this paper, we describe the physics of this conductivity $σ_Q$ in quantum critical metals obtained by charge doping a strongly interacting conformal field theory. We show that it satisfies an Einstein relation and controls the diffusivity of a conserved charge in the metal. We compute $σ_Q$ in a class of theories with holographic gravitational duals. Finally, we show how the temperature scaling of $σ_Q$ depends on certain critical exponents characterizing the quantum critical metal. The holographic results are found to be reproduced by the scaling analysis, with the charge density operator becoming marginal in the emergent low energy quantum critical theory.

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arXiv2015

Momentum dissipation and effective theories of coherent and incoherent transport

We study heat transport in two systems without momentum conservation: a hydrodynamic system, and a holographic system with spatially dependent, massless scalar fields. When momentum dissipates slowly, there is a well-defined, coherent collective excitation in the AC heat conductivity, and a crossover between sound-like and diffusive transport at small and large distance scales. When momentum dissipates quickly, there is no such excitation in the incoherent AC heat conductivity, and diffusion dominates at all distance scales. For a critical value of the momentum dissipation rate, we compute exact expressions for the Green's functions of our holographic system due to an emergent gravitational self-duality, similar to electric/magnetic duality, and SL(2,R) symmetries. We extend the coherent/incoherent classification to examples of charge transport in other holographic systems: probe brane theories and neutral theories with non-Maxwell actions.

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arXiv2014

Holographic duality and the resistivity of strange metals

We present a strange metal, described by a holographic duality, which reproduces the famous linear resistivity of the normal state of the copper oxides, in addition to the linear specific heat. This holographic metal reveals a simple and general mechanism for producing such a resistivity, which requires only quenched disorder and a strongly interacting, locally quantum critical state. The key is the minimal viscosity of the latter: unlike in a Fermi-liquid, the viscosity is very small and therefore is important for the electrical transport. This mechanism produces a resistivity proportional to the electronic entropy.

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arXiv2014

AdS/CFT and Landau Fermi liquids

We study the field theory dual to a charged gravitational background in which the low temperature entropy scales linearly with the temperature. We exhibit the existence of a sound mode which is described by hydrodynamics, even at energies much larger than the temperature, and explain how this, and other properties of the field theory, are consistent with those of a (3+1)-dimensional Landau Fermi liquid, finely tuned to the Pomeranchuk critical point. We also discuss how one could engineer a higher-derivative gravitational Lagrangian which reproduces the correct low temperature behavior of shear viscosity in a generic Landau Fermi liquid.

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arXiv2013

Momentum relaxation in holographic massive gravity

We study the effects of momentum relaxation on observables in a recently proposed holographic model in which the conservation of momentum in the field theory is broken by the presence of a bulk graviton mass. In the hydrodynamic limit, we show that these effects can be incorporated by a simple modification of the energy-momentum conservation equation to account for the dissipation of momentum over a single characteristic timescale. We compute this timescale as a function of the graviton mass terms and identify the previously known "wall of stability" as the point at which this relaxation timescale becomes negative. We also calculate analytically the zero temperature AC conductivity at low frequencies. In the limit of a small graviton mass this reduces to the simple Drude form, and we compute the corrections to this which are important for larger masses. Finally, we undertake a preliminary investigation of the stability of the zero temperature black brane solution of this model, and rule out spatially modulated instabilities of a certain kind.

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arXiv2013

Hydrodynamics of cold holographic matter

We show that at any temperature, the low-energy (with respect to the chemical potential) collective excitations of the transverse components of the energy-momentum tensor and the global U(1) current in the field theory dual to the planar RN-AdS4 black hole are simply those of hydrodynamics. That is, hydrodynamics is applicable even at energy scales much greater than the temperature. It is applicable even at zero temperature. Specifically, we find that there is always a diffusion mode with diffusion constant proportional to the ratio of entropy density to energy density. At low temperatures, the leading order momentum and temperature dependences of the dispersion relation of this mode are controlled by the dimension of an operator in the thermal CFT1 dual to the near-horizon Schwarzschild-AdS2 geometry.

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arXiv2012

Collective Excitations of Holographic Quantum Liquids in a Magnetic Field

We use holography to study N=4 supersymmetric SU(Nc) Yang-Mills theory in the large-Nc and large-coupling limits coupled to a number Nf << Nc of (n+1)-dimensional massless supersymmetric hypermultiplets in the Nc representation of SU(Nc), with n=2,3. We introduce a temperature T, a baryon number chemical potential mu, and a baryon number magnetic field B, and work in a regime with mu >> T,\sqrt{B}. We study the collective excitations of these holographic quantum liquids by computing the poles in the retarded Green's function of the baryon number charge density operator and the associated peaks in the spectral function. We focus on the evolution of the collective excitations as we increase the frequency relative to T, i.e. the hydrodynamic/collisionless crossover. We find that for all B, at low frequencies the tallest peak in the spectral function is associated with hydrodynamic charge diffusion. At high frequencies the tallest peak is associated with a sound mode similar to the zero sound mode in the collisionless regime of a Landau Fermi liquid. The sound mode has a gap proportional to B, and as a result for intermediate frequencies and for B sufficiently large compared to T the spectral function is strongly suppressed. We find that the hydrodynamic/collisionless crossover occurs at a frequency that is approximately B-independent.

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arXiv2011

Bosonic excitations of the AdS4 Reissner-Nordstrom black hole

We study the long-lived modes of the charge density and energy density correlators in the strongly-coupled, finite density field theory dual to the AdS4 Reissner-Nordstrom black hole. For small momenta q<<μ, these correlators contain a pole due to sound propagation, as well as a pole due to a long-lived, purely imaginary mode analogous to the μ=0 hydrodynamic charge diffusion mode. As the temperature is raised in the range T\lesssimμ, the sound attenuation shows no significant temperature dependence. When T\gtrsimμ, it quickly approaches the μ=0 hydrodynamic result where it decreases like 1/T. It does not share any of the temperature-dependent properties of the 'zero sound' of Landau Fermi liquids observed in the strongly-coupled D3/D7 field theory. For such small momenta, the energy density spectral function is dominated by the sound mode at all temperatures, whereas the charge density spectral function undergoes a crossover from being dominated by the sound mode at low temperatures to being dominated by the diffusion mode when T μ^2/q. This crossover occurs due to the changing residue at each pole. We also compute the momentum dependence of these spectral functions and their corresponding long-lived poles at fixed, low temperatures T<<μ.

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arXiv2011

Holographic zero sound at finite temperature

We use gauge-gravity duality to study the temperature dependence of the zero sound mode and the fundamental matter diffusion mode in the strongly coupled {\cal N}=4 SU(N_c) supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with N_f {\cal N}=2 hypermultiplets in the N_c>>1, N_c>>N_f limit, which is holographically realized via the D3/D7 brane system. In the high density limit μ>>T, three regimes can be identified in the behavior of these modes, analogous to the collisionless quantum, collisionless thermal and hydrodynamic regimes of a Landau Fermi-liquid. The transitions between the three regimes are characterized by the parameters T/μand (T/μ)^2 respectively, and in each of these regimes the modes have a distinctively different temperature and momentum dependence. The collisionless-hydrodynamic transition occurs when the zero sound poles of the density-density correlator in the complex frequency plane collide on the imaginary axis to produce a hydrodynamic diffusion pole. We observe that the properties characteristic of a Landau Fermi-liquid zero sound mode are present in the D3/D7 system despite the atypical T^6/μ^3 temperature scaling of the specific heat and an apparent lack of a directly identifiable Fermi surface.

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