Particle theory

Abstract:

In recent years several approaches to quantum gravity have found evidence for a scale dependent spectral dimension of space-time varying from four at large scales to two at small scales of order of the Planck length. The first evidence came from numerical results on four-dimensional causal dynamical triangulations (CDT) [Ambjorn et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 (2005) 171]. Since then little progress has been made in analytically understanding the numerical results coming from the CDT approach and showing that they remain valid when taking the continuum limit. Here we argue that the spectral dimension can be determined from a model with fewer degrees of freedom obtained from the CDTs by "radial reduction". In the resulting "toy" model we can take the continuum limit analytically and obtain a scale dependent spectral dimension varying from four to two with scale and having functional behaviour exactly of the form which was conjectured on the basis of the numerical results.

Abstract:

We use gauge-gravity duality to study the temperature dependence of the zero sound mode and the fundamental matter diffusion mode in the strongly coupled N=4 SU(N c) supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory with N f N=2 hypermultiplets in the N c≫ 1, N c ≫ N f limit, which is holographically realized via the D3/D7 brane system. In the high density limit μ≫T, three regimes can be identified in the behavior of these modes, analogous to the collisionless quantum, collisionless thermal, and hydrodynamic regimes of a Landau Fermi liquid. The transitions between the three regimes are characterized by the parameters T/μ and (T/μ) 2, respectively, and in each of these regimes the modes have a distinctively different temperature and momentum dependence. The collisionless-hydrodynamic transition occurs when the zero sound poles of the density-density correlator in the complex frequency plane collide on the imaginary axis to produce a hydrodynamic diffusion pole. We observe that the properties characteristic of a Landau Fermi-liquid zero sound mode are present in the D3/D7 system despite the atypical T 6/μ 3 temperature scaling of the specific heat and an apparent lack of a directly identifiable Fermi surface. © 2012 American Physical Society.