We consider a general class of electrically charged black holes of EinsteinMaxwell-scalar theory that are holographically dual to conformal field theories at finite charge density which break translation invariance explicitly. We examine the linearised perturbations about the solutions that are associated with the thermoelectric DC conductivity. We show that there is a decoupled sector at the black hole horizon which must solve generalised Stokes equations for a charged fluid. By solving these equations we can obtain the DC conductivity of the dual field theory. For Q-lattices and one-dimensional lattices we solve the fluid equations to obtain closed form expressions for the DC conductivity in terms of the solution at the black hole horizon. We also determine the leading order DC conductivity for lattices that can be expanded as a perturbative series about translationally invariant solutions.

Black hole solutions of type IIB supergravity have been previously constructed that describe the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma with an anisotropic spatial deformation. The zero temperature limit of these black holes approach a Lifshitz-like scaling solution in the infrared. We show that these black holes become unstable at low temperature and we construct a new class of black hole solutions which are thermodynamically preferred. The phase transition is third order and incorporates a spontaneous breaking of the SO(6) global symmetry down to SO(4) × SO(2). The critical exponents for the phase transition are given by (α, β, γ, δ) = (−1, 1, 1, 2) which differ from the standard mean-field exponents usually seen in holography. At low temperatures the black holes approach a novel kind of scaling behaviour in the far IR with spatial anisotropy and hyperscaling violation. We show that the new ground states are thermal insulators in the direction of the anisotropy.

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To specify a grain boundary at a macroscopic length scale requires the specification of five degrees of freedom. We use a specification in which three degrees of freedom associated with the boundary misorientation are in an orthogonal subspace from two associated with the mean boundary plane. By using Rodrigues vectors to describe rotations, we show how paths through these subspaces may be characterized. Some of these paths correspond to physical processes involving grain boundaries during microstructural evolution. Exploiting the orthogonality of the subspaces, a metric to measure ‘distance’ between two boundaries is defined in terms of the minimum set of rotations required to map one boundary on to the other. We compare our metric with others that have appeared. The existence of rotational symmetry in face-centred cubic crystals leads to as many as 2304 equivalent specifications of a boundary. We illustrate this multiplicity of descriptions for the (111) twin and a more general boundary. We present an algorithm to evaluate the geodesic distance between two boundaries, and apply it to identify the path along which the distance between these two boundaries is minimized. In general, the shortest path does not involve descriptions of boundary misorientations with the smallest misorientation angles.

Reprinted with permission from the American Physical Society: Physical Review D 95, 025022 c (2017) by the American Physical Society. Readers may view, browse, and/or download material for temporary copying purposes only, provided these uses are for noncommercial personal purposes. Except as provided by law, this material may not be further reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modied, adapted, performed, displayed, published, or sold in whole or part, without prior written permission from the American Physical Society.Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. We study the thermal transport properties of general conformal field theories (CFTs) on curved spacetimes in the leading order viscous hydrodynamic limit. At the level of linear response, we show that the thermal transport is governed by a system of forced linearized Navier-Stokes equations on a curved space. Our setup includes CFTs in flat spacetime that have been deformed by spatially dependent and periodic local temperature variations or strains that have been applied to the CFT, and hence is relevant to CFTs arising in condensed matter systems at zero charge density. We provide specific examples of deformations which lead to thermal backflow driven by a dc source: that is, the thermal currents locally flow in the opposite direction to the applied dc thermal source. We also consider thermal transport for relativistic quantum field theories that are not conformally invariant.

We consider black hole solutions of Einstein gravity that describe deformations of CFTs at finite temperature in which spatial translations have been broken explicitly. We focus on deformations that are periodic in the non-compact spatial directions, which effectively corresponds to considering the CFT on a spatial torus with a non-trivial metric. We apply a DC thermal gradient and show that in a hydrodynamic limit the linearised, local thermal currents can be determined by solving linearised, forced Navier-Stokes equations for an incompressible fluid on the torus. We also show how sub-leading corrections to the thermal current can be calculated as well as showing how the full stress tensor response that is generated by the DC source can be obtained. We also compare our results with the fluid-gravity approach.arXiv:1609.08912v2 [hep-th]

Black hole solutions of type IIB supergravity were previously found that are dual to N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma with an anisotropic spatial deformation. In the zero temperature limit, these black holes approach a Liftshitz like scaling solution in the IR. It was recently shown that these black holes are unstable, and at low temperatures there is a new class of black hole solutions that are thermodynamically preferred. We extend this analysis, by considering consistent truncations of the Kaluza-Klein reduction of IIB supergravity on a five-sphere that preserves multiple scalar and U(1) gauge fields. We show that the previously constructed black holes become unstable at low temperatures, and construct new classes of exotic black hole solutions. We study the DC thermo-electric conductivity of these U(1) charged black holes, and find a diverging DC conductivity at zero temperature due to the divergence of the gauge field coupling.