We investigate the analytic structure of thermal energy-momentum tensor correlators at large but finite coupling in quantum field theories with gravity duals. We compute corrections to the quasinormal spectra of black branes due to the presence of higher derivative R 2 and R 4 terms in the action, focusing on the dual to N = 4 SYM theory and Gauss-Bonnet gravity. We observe the appearance of new poles in the complex frequency plane at finite coupling. The new poles interfere with hydrodynamic poles of the correlators leading to the breakdown of hydrodynamic description at a coupling-dependent critical value of the wave-vector. The dependence of the critical wave vector on the coupling implies that the range of validity of the hydrodynamic description increases monotonically with the coupling. The behavior of the quasinormal spectrum at large but finite coupling may be contrasted with the known properties of the hierarchy of relaxation times determined by the spectrum of a linearized kinetic operator at weak coupling. We find that the ratio of a transport coefficient such as viscosity to the relaxation time determined by the fundamental non-hydrodynamic quasinormal frequency changes rapidly in the vicinity of infinite coupling but flattens out for weaker coupling, suggesting an extrapolation from strong coupling to the kinetic theory result. We note that the behavior of the quasinormal spectrum is qualitatively different depending on whether the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density is greater or less than the universal, infinite coupling value of /4πk B . In the former case, the density of poles increases, indicating a formation of branch cuts in the weak coupling limit, and the spectral function shows the appearance of narrow peaks. We also discuss the relation of the viscosity-entropy ratio to conjectured bounds on relaxation time in quantum systems.

Hydrodynamics can be formulated as the gradient expansion of conserved currents in terms of the fundamental fields describing the near-equilibrium fluid flow. In the relativistic case, the Navier-Stokes equations follow from the conservation of the stress-energy tensor to first order in derivatives. In this paper, we go beyond the presently understood second-order hydrodynamics and discuss the systematisation of obtaining the hydrodynamic expansion to an arbitrarily high order. As an example of the algorithm that we present, we fully classify the gradient expansion at third order for neutral fluids in four dimensions, thus finding the most general next-to-leading-order corrections to the relativistic Navier-Stokes equations in curved space-time. In doing so, we list $20$ new transport coefficient candidates in the conformal and $68$ in the non-conformal case. As we do not consider any constraints that could potentially arise from the local entropy current analysis, this is the maximal possible set of neutral third-order transport coefficients. To investigate the physical implications of these new transport coefficients, we obtain the third-order corrections to the linear dispersion relations that describe the propagation of diffusion and sound waves in relativistic fluids. We also compute the corrections to the scalar (spin-$2$) two-point correlation function of the third-order stress-energy tensor. Furthermore, as an example of a non-linear hydrodynamic flow, we calculate the third-order corrections to the energy density of a boost-invariant Bjorken flow. Finally, we apply our field theoretic results to the $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills fluid at infinite 't Hooft coupling and infinite number of colours to find the values of five new linear combinations of the conformal transport coefficients.Comment: V5: 33 pages. Typos fixed in Eqs. (5), (118) and (126). As a result, the value of the transport coefficient $\theta_2$ has been correcte

Abstract: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 AdS 4 ReissnerNordström 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 µ, the sound attenuation shows no significant temperature dependence. When T µ, 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.

It is presently unknown how strong lattice potentials influence the fermion spectral function of the holographic strange metals predicted by the AdS/CFT correspondence. This embodies a crucial test for the application of holography to condensed matter experiments. We show that for one particular momentum direction this spectrum can be computed for arbitrary strength of the effective translational symmetry breaking potential of the so-called Bianchi-VII geometry employing ordinary differential equations. Deep in the strange metal regime we find rather small changes to the single-fermion response computed by the emergent quantum critical IR, even when the potential becomes relevant in the infra-red. However, in the regime where holographic quasi-particles occur, defining a Fermi surface in the continuum, they acquire a finite lifetime at any finite potential strength. At the transition from irrelevancy to relevancy of the Bianchi potential in the deep infra-red the quasi-particle remnants disappear completely and the fermion spectrum exhibits a purely relaxational behaviour.

The fermion sign problem is often viewed as a sheer inconvenience that plagues numerical studies of strongly interacting electron systems. Only recently has it been suggested that fermion signs are fundamental for the universal behavior of critical metallic systems and crucially enhance their degree of quantum entanglement. In this work we explore potential connections between emergent scale invariance of fermion sign structures and scaling properties of bipartite entanglement entropies. Our analysis is based on a wave-function Ansatz that incorporates collective, long-range backflow correlations into fermionic Slater determinants. Such wave functions mimic the collapse of a Fermi liquid at a quantum critical point. Their nodal surfaces, a representation of the fermion sign structure in many-particle configurations space, show fractal behavior up to a length scale ξ that diverges at a critical backflow strength. We show that the Hausdorff dimension of the fractal nodal surface depends on ξ , the number of fermions and the exponent of the backflow. For the same wave functions we numerically calculate the second Rényi entanglement entropy S 2 . Our results show a crossover from volume scaling, S 2 ∼ θ (θ = 2 in d = 2 dimensions), to the characteristic Fermi-liquid behavior S 2 ∼ ln on scales larger than ξ . We find that volume scaling of the entanglement entropy is a robust feature of critical backflow fermions, independent of the backflow exponent and hence the fractal dimension of the scale invariant sign structure.