We study second-order hydrodynamic transport in strongly coupled non-conformal field theories with holographic gravity duals in asymptotically anti-de Sitter space. We first derive new Kubo formulae for five second-order transport coefficients in nonconformal fluids in (3 + 1) dimensions. We then apply them to holographic RG flows induced by scalar operators of dimension ∆ = 3. For general background solutions of the dual bulk geometry, we find explicit expressions for the five transport coefficients at infinite coupling and show that a specific combination,H = 2ητ π − 2 (κ − κ * ) − λ 2 , always vanishes. We prove analytically that the Haack-Yarom identity H = 2ητ π − 4λ 1 − λ 2 = 0, which is known to be true for conformal holographic fluids at infinite coupling, also holds when taking into account leading non-conformal corrections. The numerical results we obtain for two specific families of RG flows suggest that H vanishes regardless of conformal symmetry. Our work provides further evidence that the Haack-Yarom identity H = 0 may be universally satisfied by strongly coupled fluids.

In the first part of the paper, we discuss different versions of the AdS/CFT dictionary out of equilibrium. We show that the Skenderis-van Rees prescription and the "extrapolate" dictionary are equivalent at the level of "in-in" two point functions of free scalar fields in arbitrary asymptotically AdS spacetimes. In the second part of the paper, we calculate two point correlation functions in dynamical spacetimes using the "extrapolate" dictionary. These calculations are performed for conformally coupled scalar fields in examples of spacetimes undergoing gravitational collapse, the AdS 2 -Vaidya spacetime and the AdS 3 -Vaidya spacetime, which allow us to address the problem of thermalization following a quench in the boundary field theory. The computation of the correlators is formulated as an initial value problem in the bulk spacetime. Finally, we compare our results for AdS 3 -Vaidya to results in the previous literature obtained using the geodesic approximation and we find qualitative agreement.

We study the time evolution of Wightman two-point functions of scalar fields in AdS3-Vaidya, a spacetime undergoing gravitational collapse. In the boundary field theory, the collapse corresponds to a quench process where the dual 1+1 dimensional CFT is taken out of equilibrium and subsequently thermalizes. From the two-point function, we extract an effective occupation number in the boundary theory and study how it approaches the thermal Bose-Einstein distribution. We find that the Wightman functions, as well as the effective occupation numbers, thermalize with a rate set by the lowest quasinormal mode of the scalar field in the BTZ black hole background. We give a heuristic argument for the quasinormal decay, which is expected to apply to more general Vaidya spacetimes also in higher dimensions. This suggests a unified picture in which thermalization times of one-and two-point functions are determined by the lowest quasinormal mode. Finally, we study how these results compare to previous calculations of two-point functions based on the geodesic approximation.