We compute the thermodynamic properties of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models of fermions with a conserved fermion number, Q. We extend a previously proposed Schwarzian effective action to include a phase field, and this describes the low temperature energy and Q fluctuations. We obtain higherdimensional generalizations of the SYK models which display disordered metallic states without quasiparticle excitations, and we deduce their thermoelectric transport coefficients. We also examine the corresponding properties of Einstein-Maxwell-axion theories on black brane geometries which interpolate from either AdS 4 or AdS 5 to an AdS 2 × R 2 or AdS 2 × R 3 near-horizon geometry. These provide holographic descriptions of non-quasiparticle metallic states without momentum conservation. We find a precise match between low temperature transport and thermodynamics of the SYK and holographic models. In both models the Seebeck transport coefficient is exactly equal to the Q-derivative of the entropy. For the SYK models, quantum chaos, as characterized by the butterfly velocity and the Lyapunov rate, universally determines the thermal diffusivity, but not the charge diffusivity.

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.

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.

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.

Recent developments have indicated that in addition to out-of-time ordered correlation functions (OTOCs), quantum chaos also has a sharp manifestation in the thermal energy density two-point functions, at least for maximally chaotic systems. The manifestation, referred to as pole-skipping, concerns the analytic behaviour of energy density two-point functions around a special point ω = iλ, k = iλ/v B in the complex frequency and momentum plane. Here λ and v B are the Lyapunov exponent and butterfly velocity characterising quantum chaos. In this paper we provide an argument that the phenomenon of pole-skipping is universal for general finite temperature systems dual to Einstein gravity coupled to matter. In doing so we uncover a surprising universal feature of the linearised Einstein equations around a static black hole geometry. We also study analytically a holographic axion model where all of the features of our general argument as well as the pole-skipping phenomenon can be verified in detail.

We explore a new class of general properties of thermal holographic Green's functions that can be deduced from the near-horizon behaviour of classical perturbations in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes. We show that at negative imaginary Matsubara frequencies and appropriate complex values of the wavenumber the retarded Green's functions of generic operators are not uniquely defined, due to the lack of a unique ingoing solution for the bulk perturbations. From a boundary perspective these 'pole-skipping' points correspond to locations in the complex frequency and momentum planes at which a line of poles of the retarded Green's function intersects with a line of zeroes. As a consequence the dispersion relations of collective modes in the boundary theory at energy scales ω ∼ T are directly constrained by the bulk dynamics near the black-brane horizon. For the case of conserved U (1) current and energy-momentum tensor operators we give examples where the dispersion relations of hydrodynamic modes pass through a succession of pole-skipping points as real wavenumber is increased. We discuss implications of our results for transport, hydrodynamics and quantum chaos in holographic systems. arXiv:1904.12883v3 [hep-th] 13 Jan 2020 45 E.3 Transverse metric perturbations 48 E.4 Longitudinal metric perturbations 49 E.5 Transverse metric perturbations in a charged black hole 52 -1 -1 v B is the 'butterfly velocity' [15][16][17] of the dual quantum field theory. 2 Pole-skipping in G R εε at (ω * , k * ) was also shown to hold in holographic theories dual to higher derivative gravity in [20].3 The symbol ω n is more conventionally used to refer to the real set of Matsubara frequencies ω E = 2πT n at which the Euclidean Green's function is defined. Here we are interested in studying the real time correlator G R (ω, k) and will abuse the more common notation somewhat by using the symbol ω n to refer to the special pure imaginary frequencies ω = ω n = −i2πT n. These are referred to as the 'negative imaginary Matsubara frequencies' for obvious reasons.We are grateful to Nejc Ceplak, Saso Grozdanov, Hong Liu, and Andrei Starinets for helpful discussions. M. B. received support from the Office of High Energy Physics of U.S.

We study the thermal diffusivity D T in models of metals without quasiparticle excitations ("strange metals"). The many-body quantum chaos and transport properties of such metals can be efficiently described by a holographic representation in a gravitational theory in an emergent curved spacetime with an additional spatial dimension. We find that at generic infrared fixed points D T is always related to parameters characterizing many-body quantum chaos: the butterfly velocity v B and Lyapunov time τ L through D T ∼ v 2 B τ L . The relationship holds independently of the charge density, periodic potential strength, or magnetic field at the fixed point. The generality of this result follows from the observation that the thermal conductivity of strange metals depends only on the metric near the horizon of a black hole in the emergent spacetime and is otherwise insensitive to the profile of any matter fields.

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 $\sigma_Q$ 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 $\sigma_Q$ in a class of theories with holographic gravitational duals. Finally, we show how the temperature scaling of $\sigma_Q$ 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.Comment: v1: 1 + 16 pages + reference