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Steven S. Gubser

Publications and source records attributed to Steven S. Gubser.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2015

Complexified boost invariance and holographic heavy ion collisions

At strong coupling holographic studies have shown that heavy ion collisions do not obey normal boost invariance. Here we study a modified boost invariance through a complex shift in time, and show that this leads to surprisingly good agreement with numerical holographic computations. When including perturbations the agreement becomes even better, both in the hydrodynamic and the far-from-equilibrium regime. One of the main advantages is an analytic formulation of the stress-energy tensor of the longitudinal dynamics of holographic heavy ion collisions.

hep-th↗
arXiv2014

Holographic Fermi surfaces at finite temperature in top-down constructions

We calculate the two-point Green's functions of operators dual to fermions of maximal gauged supergravity in four and five dimensions, in finite temperature backgrounds with finite charge density. The numerical method used in these calculations is based on differential equations for bilinears of the supergravity fermions rather than the equations of motion for the fermions themselves. The backgrounds we study have vanishing entropy density in appropriate extremal limits. Holographic Fermi surfaces are observed when the scalar field participating in the dual field theory operator has an expectation value, which makes sense from the point of view that the quasi-particles near the Fermi surfaces observed carry non-singlet gauge quantum numbers in the dual field theory.

hep-th↗
arXiv2014

An axial gauge ansatz for higher spin theories

We present an ansatz which makes the equations of motion more tractable for the simplest of Vasiliev's four-dimensional higher spin theories. The ansatz is similar to axial gauge in electromagnetism. We present a broad class of solutions in the gauge where the spatial connection vanishes, and we discuss the lift of one of these solutions to a full spacetime solution via a gauge transformation.

hep-th↗
arXiv2014

Shooting String Holography of Jet Quenching at RHIC and LHC

We derive a new formula for jet energy loss using finite endpoint momentum shooting strings initial conditions in SYM plasmas to overcome the difficulties of previous falling string holographic scenarios. We apply the new formula to compute the nuclear modification factor RAA and the elliptic flow parameter v2 of light hadrons at RHIC and LHC. We show furthermore that Gauss-Bonnet quadratic curvature corrections to the AdS5 geometry improve the agreement with the recent data.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2014

Strings and vortex rings

We treat string propagation and interaction in the presence of a background Neveu-Schwarz three-form field strength, suitable for describing vortex rings in a superfluid or low-viscosity normal fluid. A circular vortex ring exhibits instabilities which have been recognized for many years, but whose precise boundaries we determine for the first time analytically in the small core limit. Two circular vortices colliding head-on exhibit stronger instabilities which cause splitting into many small vortices at late times. We provide an approximate analytic treatment of these instabilities and show that the most unstable wavelength is parametrically larger than a dynamically generated length scale which in many hydrodynamic systems is close to the cutoff. We also summarize how the string construction we discuss can be derived from the Gross-Pitaevskii lagrangian, and also how it compares to the action for giant gravitons.

hep-th↗
arXiv2014

Holographic light quark jet quenching at RHIC and LHC via the shooting strings

A new shooting string holographic model of jet quenching of light quarks in strongly coupled plasmas is presented to overcome the phenomenological incompatibilities of previous falling string holographic scenarios that emerged when confronted with the recent LHC data. This model is based on strings with finite momentum endpoints that start close to the horizon and lose energy as they approach the boundary. This framework is applied to compute the nuclear modification factor RAA of light hadrons at RHIC and LHC, showing that this model improves greatly the comparison with the recent light hadron suppression data. The effects of the Gauss-Bonnet quadratic curvature corrections to the AdS5 geometry further improve the agreement with the data.

hep-ph↗
arXiv2013

Minding the Gap in N=4 Super-Yang-Mills

We analyze fermionic response in the geometry holographically dual to zero-temperature N=4 Super-Yang-Mills theory with two equal nonvanishing chemical potentials, which is characterized by a singular horizon and zero ground state entropy. We show that fermionic fluctuations are completely stable within a gap in energy around a Fermi surface singularity, beyond which non-Fermi liquid behavior returns. This gap disappears abruptly once the final charge is turned on, and is associated to a discontinuity in the corresponding chemical potential. We also show that the singular near-horizon geometry lifts to a smooth AdS_3 x R^3, and interpret the gap as a region where the quasiparticle momentum is spacelike in six dimensions due to the momentum component in the Kaluza-Klein direction, corresponding to the final charge.

hep-th↗
arXiv2013

Heavy ions and string theory

We review a selection of recent developments in the application of ideas of string theory to heavy ion physics. Our topics divide naturally into equilibrium and non-equilibrium phenomena. On the non-equilibrium side, we discuss generalizations of Bjorken flow, numerical simulations of black hole formation in asymptotically anti-de Sitter geometries, equilibration in the dual field theory, and hard probes. On the equilibrium side, we summarize improved holographic QCD, extraction of transport coefficients, inclusion of chemical potentials, and approaches to the phase diagram. We close with some possible directions for future research.

hep-th↗
arXiv2013

Finite momentum at string endpoints

We argue that classical strings, both bosonic and supersymmetric, can have finite energy and momentum at their endpoints. We show that in a general curved background, string endpoints must propagate along null geodesics as long as their energy remains finite. Finite endpoint momentum allows strings with a fixed energy to travel a greater distance in an AdS5-Schwarzschild background than has been possible for classical solutions considered previously. We review the relevance to heavy ion phenomenology of the dependence of this distance on energy, and we propose a scheme for determining the instantaneous rate of energy loss.

hep-th↗
arXiv2013

A Brief History of Curvature

The trace of the stress-energy tensor of the cosmological fluid, proportional to the Ricci scalar curvature in general relativity, is determined on cosmic scales for times ranging from the inflationary epoch to the present day in the expanding Universe. The post-inflationary epoch and the thermal history of the relativistic fluid, in particular the QCD transition from asymptotic freedom to confinement and the electroweak phase transition, leave significant imprints on the scalar curvature. These imprints can be of either sign and are orders of magnitude larger than the values that would be obtained by naively extrapolating the pressureless matter of the present epoch back into the radiation-dominated epoch.

astro-ph.CO↗
arXiv2012

Complex deformations of Bjorken flow

Through a complex shift of the time coordinate, a modification of Bjorken flow is introduced which interpolates between a glasma-like stress tensor at forward rapidities and Bjorken-like hydrodynamics around mid-rapidity. A Landau-like full-stopping regime is found at early times and rapidities not too large. Approximate agreement with BRAHMS data on the rapidity distribution of produced particles at top RHIC energies can be achieved if the complex shift of the time coordinate is comparable to the inverse of the saturation scale. The form of the stress tensor follows essentially from symmetry considerations, and it can be expressed in closed form.

hep-th↗
arXiv2012

The Kibble-Zurek Problem: Universality and the Scaling Limit

Near a critical point, the equilibrium relaxation time of a system diverges and any change of control/thermodynamic parameters leads to non-equilibrium behavior. The Kibble-Zurek problem is to determine the dynamical evolution of the system parametrically close to its critical point when the change is parametrically slow. The non-equilibrium behavior in this limit is controlled entirely by the critical point and the details of the trajectory of the system in parameter space (the protocol) close to the critical point. Together, they define a universality class consisting of critical exponents-discussed in the seminal work by Kibble and Zurek-and scaling functions for physical quantities, which have not been discussed hitherto. In this article, we give an extended and pedagogical discussion of the universal content in the Kibble-Zurek problem. We formally define a scaling limit for physical quantities near classical and quantum transitions for different sets of protocols. We report computations of a few scaling functions in model Gaussian and large-N problems and prove their universality with respect to protocol choice. We also introduce a new protocol in which the critical point is approached asymptotically at late times with the system marginally out of equilibrium, wherein logarithmic violations to scaling and anomalous dimensions occur even in the simple Gaussian problem.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗
arXiv2012

Analytic fermionic Green's functions from holography

We find exact, analytic solutions of the Dirac equation for a charged, massless fermion in the background of a charged, dilatonic black hole in AdS_5. The black hole descends from type IIB supergravity, where it describes D3-branes with equal angular momenta in two of the three independent planes of rotation orthogonal to the world-volume. The Green's function near the Fermi surface for a strongly coupled fermionic system can be extracted holographically from an exact solution of the Dirac equation at zero frequency but nonzero momentum. There can be several Fermi momenta, and they take the form k_F=q-n-1/2 (in units of the chemical potential), where q is the charge of the spinor, and n is a non-negative integer that labels the Fermi surfaces. Much as for holographic Fermi surfaces based on the Reissner-Nordstrom-AdS_5 solution, the dispersion relation of the excitations near the Fermi surface is determined by the geometry close to the horizon, and one can obtain Fermi liquid, marginal Fermi liquid, and non-Fermi liquid behaviors depending on the value of k_F.

hep-th↗
arXiv2012

Fermi surfaces in N=4 Super-Yang-Mills theory

We investigate and classify Fermi surface behavior for a set of fermionic modes in a family of backgrounds holographically dual to N=4 Super-Yang-Mills theory at zero temperature with two distinct chemical potentials. We numerically solve fluctuation equations for every spin-1/2 field in five-dimensional maximally supersymmetric gauged supergravity not mixing with gravitini. Different modes manifest two, one or zero Fermi surface singularities, all associated to non-Fermi liquids, and we calculate dispersion relations and widths of excitations. We study two limits where the zero-temperature entropy vanishes. In one limit, a Fermi surface approaches a marginal Fermi liquid, which we demonstrate analytically, and conductivity calculations show a hard gap with the current dual to the active gauge field superconducting, while the other is insulating. In the other limit, conductivities reveal a soft gap with the roles of the gauge fields reversed.

hep-th↗
arXiv2012

Fermi surfaces in maximal gauged supergravity

We obtain fermion fluctuation equations around extremal charged black hole geometries in maximal gauged supergravity in four and five dimensions, and we demonstrate that their solutions display Fermi surface singularities for the dual conformal field theories at finite chemical potential. The four-dimensional case is a massless charged fermion, while in five dimensions we find a massive charged fermion with a Pauli coupling. In both cases, the corresponding scaling exponent is less than one half, leading to non-Fermi liquid behavior with no stable quasiparticles, although some excitations have widths more than ten times smaller than their excitation energy. In the five-dimensional case, both the Fermi momentum and the scaling exponent appear to have simple values, and a Luttinger calculation suggests that the gauginos may carry most of the charge of the black hole.

hep-th↗
arXiv2012

Simulation of Asymptotically AdS5 Spacetimes with a Generalized Harmonic Evolution Scheme

Motivated by the gauge/gravity duality, we introduce a numerical scheme based on generalized harmonic evolution to solve the Einstein field equations on asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes. We work in global AdS5, which can be described by the (t,r,χ,θ,ϕ) spherical coordinates adapted to the R{\times}S3 boundary. We focus on solutions that preserve an SO(3) symmetry that acts to rotate the 2-spheres parametrized by θ,ϕ. In the boundary conformal field theory (CFT), the way in which this symmetry manifests itself hinges on the way we choose to embed Minkowski space in R{\times}S3. We present results from an ongoing study of prompt black hole formation via scalar field collapse, and explore the subsequent quasi-normal ringdown. Beginning with initial data characterized by highly distorted apparent horizon geometries, the metrics quickly evolve, via quasi-normal ringdown, to equilibrium static black hole solutions at late times. The lowest angular number quasi-normal modes are consistent with the linear modes previously found in perturbative studies, whereas the higher angular modes are a combination of linear modes and of harmonics arising from non-linear mode-coupling. We extract the stress energy tensor of the dual CFT on the boundary, and find that despite being highly inhomogeneous initially, it nevertheless evolves from the outset in a manner that is consistent with a thermalized N=4 SYM fluid. As a first step towards closer contact with relativistic heavy ion collision physics, we map this solution to a Minkowski piece of the R{\times}S3 boundary, and obtain a corresponding fluid flow in Minkowski space.

hep-th↗
arXiv2011

Conformal symmetry and the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation

Solutions to the Balitsky-Kovchegov equation are considered which respect an SO(3) subgroup of the conformal group. The symmetry dictates a specific dependence of the saturation scale on the impact parameter. Applications to deep inelastic scattering are considered.

hep-th↗