Andrei Starinets

Abstract:

Quantum liquids are characterized by the distinctive properties such as the low-temperature behavior of heat capacity and the spectrum of low-energy quasiparticle excitations. In particular, at low temperature, Fermi liquids exhibit the zero sound, predicted by Landau in 1957 and subsequently observed in liquid He-3. In this Letter, we ask whether such characteristic behavior is present in theories with a holographically dual description. We consider a class of gauge theories with fundamental matter fields whose holographic dual in the appropriate limit is given in terms of the Dirac-Born-Infeld action in anti-de Sitter space. We find that these systems also exhibit a sound mode at zero temperature despite having a non-Fermi-liquid behavior of the specific heat. These properties suggest that holography identifies a new type of quantum liquid which potentially could be experimentally realized in strongly correlated systems. © 2009 The American Physical Society.

Abstract:

The membrane paradigm approach to black hole physics introduces the notion of a stretched horizon as a fictitious time-like surface endowed with physical characteristics such as entropy, viscosity and electrical conductivity. We show that certain properties of the stretched horizons are encoded in the quasinormal spectrum of black holes. We compute analytically the lowest quasinormal frequency of a vector-type perturbation for a generic black hole with a translationally invariant horizon (black brane) in terms of the background metric components. The resulting dispersion relation is identical to the one obtained in the membrane paradigm treatment of the diffusion on stretched horizons. Combined with the Buchel-Liu universality theorem for the membrane's diffusion coefficient, our result means that in the long wavelength limit the black brane spectrum of gravitational perturbations exhibits a universal, purely imaginary quasinormal frequency. In the context of gauge-gravity duality, this provides yet another (third) proof of the universality of shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in theories with gravity duals. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.