We calculate the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density for charged black branes in third order Lovelock theory. For chargeless black branes, the result turns out to be consistent with the prediction made in $\rm arXiv:0808.3498[\rm hep-th] $. We find that, the third order Lovelock gravity term does not contribute to causality violation unlike the Gauss-Bonnet term. The stability of the black brane again requires the value of the Lovelock coupling constant to be bounded by 1/4 in the infinite dimensionality limit.
Based on the finite-temperature AdS/CFT correspondence, we calculate the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density in any Lovelock theories to any order. Our result shows that any Lovelock correction terms except the Gauss-Bonnet term have no contribution to the value of $η/s$. This result is consistent with that of Brustein and Medved's prediction.
We consider Lovelock theories of gravity in the context of AdS/CFT. We show that, for these theories, causality violation on a black hole background can occur well in the interior of the geometry, thus posing more stringent constraints than were previously found in the literature. Also, we find that instabilities of the geometry can appear for certain parameter values at any point in the geometry, as well in the bulk as close to the horizon. These new sources of causality violation and instability should be related to CFT features that do not depend on the UV behavior. They solve a puzzle foun…
We study the membrane paradigm for horizons in Lanczos-Lovelock models of gravity in arbitrary D dimensions and find compact expressions for the pressure p and viscosity coefficients ηand ζof the membrane fluid. We show that the membrane pressure is intimately connected with the Noether charge entropy S_Wald of the horizon when we consider a specific m-th order Lanczos-Lovelock model, through the relation pA/T=(D-2m)/(D-2)S_Wald, where T is the temperature and A is the area of the horizon. Similarly, the viscosity coefficients are expressible in terms of entropy and quasi-local energy associat…
We study the dual fluid on a finite cutoff surface outside the black brane horizon in the third order Lovelock gravity. Using nonrelativistic long-wavelength expansion, we obtain the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations of dual fluid with external force density on the finite cutoff surface. The viscosity to entropy density ratio $η/s$ is independent of cutoff surface and does not get modification from the third order Lovelock gravity influence. The obtained ratio agrees with the results obtained by using other methods, such as the Kubo formula at the AdS boundary and the membrane paradigm at…
We study the pathologies in AdS black branes in Lovelock theory. More precisely, we examine the conditions that AdS black branes have the naked singularity, the ghost instability and the dynamical instability. From the point of view of the AdS/CFT correspondence, the pathologies in AdS black branes indicate the pathologies in the corresponding CFT. Hence, we need to be careful when we apply AdS/CFT in Lovelock theory to various phenomena such as the shear viscosity to entropy ratio in strongly coupled quantum filed theory.
We study the entropy evolution of black holes in Lovelock gravity by formulating a thermodynamic generalization of null Raychaudhuri equation. We show that the similarity between the expressions of entropy change of the black hole horizon due to perturbation and that of a fluid, which is out of equilibrium, transcends beyond general relativity to the Lovelock class of theories. Exploiting this analogy we find that the shear and bulk viscosities for the black holes in Lovelock theories exactly match with those obtained in the membrane paradigm and also from holographic considerations.
The shear viscosity bound violation in Einstein gravity for anisotropic black branes is discussed, with the aim of constraining the deviation of the shear viscosity-entropy density ratio from the shear viscosity bound using causality and thermodynamics analysis. The results show that no stringent constraints can be imposed. The diffusion bound in anisotropic phases is also studied. Ultimately, it is concluded that shear viscosity violation always occurs in cases where the equation of motion of the metric fluctuations cannot be written in a form identical to that of the minimally coupled massle…
In a recent Letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114 091301 (2105)] the cause of the acceleration of the present Universe has been identified with the shear viscosity of an imperfect relativistic fluid even in the absence of any bulk viscous contribution. The gist of this comment is that the shear viscosity, if anything, can only lead to an accelerated expansion over sufficiently small scales well inside the Hubble radius.
We study holographic implications of Lovelock gravities in AdS spacetimes. For a generic Lovelock gravity in arbitrary spacetime dimensions we formulate the existence condition for asymptotically AdS black holes. We consider small fluctuations around these black holes and determine the constraint on Lovelock parameters by demanding causality of the boundary theory. For the case of cubic Lovelock gravity in seven spacetime dimensions we compute the holographic Weyl anomaly and determine the three point functions of the stress energy tensor in the boundary CFT. Remarkably, these correlators happ…
We calculate the shear viscosity and anomalous baryon number violation rate in quantum field theories at finite temperature having gravity duals with hyperbolic horizons. We find the explicit dependence of these quantities on the temperature. We show that the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density is below $1/(4π)$ at all temperatures and it can be made arbitrarily small in the low temperature limit.
We investigate general features of charged Lovelock black branes by giving a detailed description of geometrical, thermodynamic and holographic properties of charged Gauss-Bonnet (GB) black branes in five dimensions. We show that when expressed in terms of effective physical parameters, the thermodynamic behaviour of charged GB black branes is completely indistinguishable from that of charged Einstein black branes. Moreover, the extremal, near-horizon limit of the two classes of branes is exactly the same as they allow for the same AdS$_2\times R_3$, near-horizon, exact solution. This implies …
We consider an effective field theory description of beyond-quasi-particle excitations aiming to associate the transport properties of the system with the spectral density of states. Tuning various properties of the many-particle correlations, we investigate how the robust microscopic features are translated into the macroscopic observables like shear viscosity and entropy density. The liquid-gas crossover is analysed using several examples. A thermal constraint on the fluidity measure, the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density, is discussed.
We derive an analytic expression for the shear viscosity of an ultra-relativistic gas in presence of both elastic $2\to 2$ and inelastic $2\leftrightarrow 3$ processes with isotropic differential cross sections. The derivation is based on the entropy principle and Grad's approximation for the off-equilibrium distribution function. The obtained formula relates the shear viscosity coefficient $η$ to the total cross sections $σ_{22}$ and $σ_{23}$ of the elastic resp. inelastic processes. The values of shear viscosity extracted using the Green-Kubo formula from kinetic transport calculations are s…
The shear viscosity of a gluon gas is calculated using the Green-Kubo relation. Time correlations of the energy-momentum tensor in thermal equilibrium are extracted from microscopic simulations using a parton cascade solving various Boltzmann collision processes. We find that the pQCD based gluon bremsstrahlung described by Gunion-Bertsch processes significantly lowers the shear viscosity by a factor of 3-8 compared to elastic scatterings. The shear viscosity scales with the coupling as 1/(alpha_s^2\log(1/alpha_s)). For a constant coupling constant the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio …
A family of deformed AdS4-Reissner-Nordström black branes, governed by a free parameter, is derived using the ADM formalism, in the context of the membrane paradigm. Their new event horizons, the Hawking temperature and other aspects are scrutinized. AdS/CFT near-horizon methods are then implemented to compute the shear viscosity-to-entropy ratio for the deformed AdS4-Reissner-Nordström metric. The Killing equation is shown to yield new values for the free parameter and the shear viscosity-to-entropy ratio is used to derive a reliable range for tidal charge.
The lower bound of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio is examined using an exact representation of the ratio through the density of states. It is shown that the lower bound in a generic physical system is not universal, its value is determined by the entropy density. Some examples of physical systems are discussed in the paper where one can expect violation of the conformal 1/4pi value.
Starting from a classical picture of shear viscosity we construct a stationary velocity gradient in a microscopic parton cascade. Employing the Navier-Stokes ansatz we extract the shear viscosity coefficient $η$. For elastic isotropic scatterings we find an excellent agreement with the analytic values. This confirms the applicability of this method. Furthermore for both elastic and inelastic scatterings with pQCD based cross sections we extract the shear viscosity coefficient $η$ for a pure gluonic system and find a good agreement with already published calculations.
Gauge theory - gravity duality predicts that the shear viscosity of N=4 supersymmetric SU(N_c) Yang-Mills plasma at temperature T in the limit of large N_c and large 't Hooft coupling g^2_{YM} N_c is independent of the coupling and equals to πN_c^2 T^3/8. In this paper, we compute the leading correction to the shear viscosity in inverse powers of 't Hooft coupling using the α'-corrected low-energy effective action of type IIB string theory. We also find the correction to the ratio of shear viscosity to the volume entropy density (equal to 1/4πin the limit of infinite coupling). The correction …
We calculate the shear viscosity of field theories with gravity duals of Gauss-Bonnet gravity with a non-trivial dilaton using AdS/CFT. We find that the dilaton filed has a non-trivial contribution to the ratio of shear viscosity over entropy density and after imposing causal constraint for the boundary field theory, the new lower bound $4/25π$, obtained from pure Gauss-Bonnet gravity, may have a small violation.
We analyze the contributions of Nambu-Goldstone modes to the shear viscosity of a superfluid atomic Fermi gas close to unitarity. We show that the low temperature experimental values of the shear viscosity to entropy ratio, $η/s$, are reproduced considering an effective shear viscosity which takes into account the collisions among Nambu-Goldstone bosons and the finite size of the optical trap. We predict that, for $T \lesssim 0.1 T_F$, $η/s$ should correlate with the size of the trap and linearly decrease with decreasing temperature. For $T \gtrsim 0.1 T_F$, we find agreement with the experime…
We present evidence for the universality of the shear viscosity of conformal gauge theory plasmas beyond infinite coupling. We comment of subtleties of computing the shear viscosity in effective models of gauge/gravity correspondence rather than in string theory.
We compute the shear viscosity of weakly coupled N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory. Our result for [eta/s], the viscosity to entropy-density ratio, is many times smaller than the corresponding weak-coupling result in QCD. This suggests that [eta/s] of QCD near the transition point is several times larger than the viscosity bound, [eta/s] >= 1/4 pi.
We compute the shear viscosity in the supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory dual to the STU background. This is a thermal gauge theory with a chemical potential. The quotient of the shear viscosity over the entropy density exhibits no deviation from the well known result 1/4π.
We calculate the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in pure SU(N) Yang-Mills theory below the critical temperature using the strong coupling expansion. The result for the eta/s ratio for temperatures around the phase transition is 0.22 for N = 2 and 0.028N^2 for N > 2. The results are consistent with the conjectured 1/4pi lower bound inspired by the AdS/CFT correspondence.
A very famous result of gauge/gravity duality is the universality of the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density in every field theory holographically dual to classical, two-derivative (Einstein) gravity. We present a way to obtain deviation form this universality by breaking the rotational symmetry spontaneously. In anisotropic fluids additional shear modes exist and their corresponding shear viscosities may be non-universal. We confirm this by explicitly calculating the shear viscosities in a transversely isotropic background, a p-wave superfluid, and study its critical behavior. This is…
The shear viscosity of QED plasma at finite temperature and density is calculated by solving Boltzmann equation with variational approach. The result shows the small chemical potential enhances the viscosity in leading-log order by adding a chemical potential quadratic term to the viscosity for the pure temperature environment.
We review the progress in the holographic calculation of shear viscosity for strongly coupled field theories. We focus on the calculation of shear viscosity from the effective coupling of transverse gravitons and present some explicit examples.
We consider strongly coupled gauge theory plasma with conserved global charges that allow for a dual gravitational description. We study the shear viscosity of the gauge theory plasma in the presence of chemical potentials for these charges. Using gauge theory/string theory correspondence we prove that at large 't Hooft coupling the ratio of the shear viscosity to the entropy density is universal.
Kovtun, Son and Starinets proposed a bound on the shear viscosity of any fluid in terms of its entropy density. We argue that this bound is always saturated for gauge theories at large 't Hooft coupling, which admit holographically dual supergravity description.
The ratio of bulk to shear viscosity is expected to exhibit a different behaviour in weakly and in strongly coupled systems. This can be expressed by its dependence on the squared sound velocity. In the high temperature QCD plasma at small running coupling, the viscosity ratio is uniquely determined by a quadratic dependence on the conformality measure, whereas in certain strongly coupled and nearly conformal theories this dependence is linear. Employing an effective kinetic theory of quasiparticle excitations with medium-modified dispersion relation, we analyze the ratio of bulk to shear visc…
We study the ratio of the shear viscosity to the entropy density for various holographic superfluids. For the s-wave case, the ratio has the universal value 1/(4pi) as in various holographic models. For the p-wave case, there are two shear viscosity coefficients because of the anisotropic boundary spacetime, and one coefficient has the universal value. For the (p+ip)-wave case, the existing technique is not applicable since there is no tensor mode of metric perturbations which decouples from Yang-Mills perturbations. Our results indicate that the shear viscosity does not show a singular behavi…
We investigate the microscopic origin of the relaxation time coefficient in relativistic fluid dynamics. We show that the extraction of the shear viscosity relaxation time via the gradient expansion is ambiguous and in general fails to give the correct result. The correct value for the shear viscosity relaxation time is extracted from the slowest non-hydrodynamic pole of the corresponding retarded Green's function, if such a pole is purely imaginary. According to the AdS/CFT correspondence, in strongly-coupled $\mathcal{N}=4$ SYM the non-hydrodynamic poles of the shear stress tensor nearest to…
In this paper we calculate the ratio of transverse shear viscosity to entropy density for the general anisotropic black brane in Horava-Lifshitz gravity. There is a well-known conjecture that states this ratio should be larger than $\frac{1}{4π}$. The ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density is proportional to the inverse square coupling of quantum thermal field theory,$\frac{η}{s} \sim \frac{1}{λ^2 }$. Especially in QFT with gravity dual the stronger coupling means the shear viscosity per entropy density gets closer to the lower bound of $\frac{1}{4π}$. The KSS bound preserves in the aniso…
We calculate the shear viscosity of field theories with gravity duals using Kubo-formula by calculating the Green function of dual transverse gravitons and confirm that the value of the shear viscosity is fully determined by the effective coupling of transverse gravitons on the horizon. We calculate the effective coupling of transverse gravitons for Einstein and Gauss-Bonnet gravities coupled with matter fields, respectively. Then we apply the resulting formula to the case of AdS Gauss-Bonnet gravity with $F^4$ term corrections of Maxwell field and discuss the effect of $F^4$ terms on the rati…
In this paper we study the shear viscosity temperature dependence of $SU(3)$--gluodynamics within lattice simulation. To do so, we measure the correlation functions of energy-momentum tensor in the range of temperatures $T/T_c\in [0.9, 1.5]$. To extract the values of shear viscosity we used two approaches. The first one is to fit the lattice data with some physically motivated ansatz for the spectral function with unknown parameters and then determine shear viscosity. The second approach is to apply the Backus-Gilbert method which allows to extract shear viscosity from the lattice data nonpara…
We discuss string theory alpha' corrections in the dual description of the expanding boost invariant N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma at strong coupling. We compute finite 't Hooft coupling corrections to the shear viscosity and find that it disagrees with the equilibrium correlation function computations. We comment on the possible source of the discrepancy.
We calculate the shear viscosity in the frame of AdS/CFT correspondence for the field theory with a gravity dual of Einstein-Born-Infeld gravity. We find that the ratio of $η/s$ is still the conjectured universal value $1/4π$ at least up to the first order of the Born-Infeld parameter $1/b^2$.
Black hole membrane paradigm states that a certain viscous membrane seems to be sitting on a stretched horizon of a black hole from the viewpoint of a distant observer. We show that the shear viscosity of the fictitious membrane can be reproduced by a highly excited string covering the stretched horizon except for a numerical coefficient.
We revisit the membrane paradigm calculations of the holographic shear viscosity tensor of strongly coupled isotropic plasmas with Einstein gravity dual by emphasizing the fact which was overlooked in the previous literatures that the shear viscosity is a fourth-rank tensor. Using the membrane paradigm we show that depending on whether the holographic shear viscosity tensor to entropy density ratio is η^j_i^j_i/s or η^{jiji}/s or η_{jiji}/s, we can derive three distinct formulae for the holographic shear viscosity tensor to entropy density ratios given explicitly in terms of the background met…
We study the shear viscosity in an effective hydrodynamic theory and holographic model where the translational symmetry is broken by massless scalar fields. We identify the shear viscosity, $η$, from the coefficient of the shear tensor in the modified constitutive relation, constructed from thermodynamic quantities, fluid velocity and the scalar fields, which break the translational symmetry explicitly. Our construction of constitutive relation is inspired by those derived from the fluid/gravity correspondence in the weakly disordered limit $m/T \ll 1$. We show that the shear viscosity from th…
We calculate the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density for a black brane of $5$-dimensional Einstein-Yang-Mills Gravity by Kubo and membrane paradigm methods. The former gives $\frac{1}{4π}$ exactly which is an expected result in the context of the Einstein-Hilbert gravity. In contrast, the membrane paradigm reaches $\frac{1}{4π}$ only in large horizon radius limit. We comment on this discrepancy.
The Einstein AdS black brane with a cloud of strings background in context of massive gravity is introduced. There is a momentum dissipation on the boundary because of graviton mass on the bulk. The ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density is calculated for this solution. This value violates the KSS bound if we apply the Dirichlet boundary and regularity on the horizon conditions. Our result shows that this value is independent of the cloud of strings.
We compute the shear viscosity of the non-commutative N=4 super Yang-Mills quantum field theory at strong coupling using the dual supergravity background. Special interest derives from the fact that the background presents an intrinsic anisotropy in space through the distinction of commutative and non-commutative directions. Despite this anisotropy the analysis exhibits the ubiquitous result η/s = 1/4πfor two different shear channels. In order to derive this result, we show that the boundary energy momentum tensor must couple to the open string metric. As a byproduct we compute the renormalise…
We study holographic RG flow of the shear viscosity tensor of anisotropic, strongly coupled N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma by using its type IIB supergravity dual in anisotropic bulk spacetime. We find that the shear viscosity tensor has three independent components in the anisotropic bulk spacetime away from the boundary, and one of the components has a non-trivial RG flow while the other two have a trivial one. For the component of the shear viscosity tensor with non-trivial RG flow, we derive its RG flow equation, and solve the equation analytically to second order in the anisotropy parameter …
Shear viscosity of the classical $Φ^4$ theory is measured using classical microcanonical simulation. To calculate the Kubo formula, we measure the energy-momentum tensor correlation function, and apply the Green-Kubo relation. Being a classical theory, the results depend on the cutoff which should be chosen in the range of the temperature. Comparison with experimentally accessible systems is also performed.
We present a proposal to measure anisotropic shear viscosity in a strongly interacting, ultra-cold, unitary Fermi gas confined in a harmonic trap. We introduce anisotropy in this setup by strongly confining the gas in one of the directions with relatively weak confinement in the remaining directions. This system has a close resemblance to anisotropic strongly coupled field theories studied recently in the context of gauge-gravity duality. Computations in such theories (which have gravity duals) revealed that some of the viscosity components of the anisotropic shear viscosity tensor can be made…
