Quantum critical transport, duality, and M theory
- Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1560 (United States)
- Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106-4030 (United States)
- Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts 02138 (United States)
- Institute for Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1550 (United States)
We consider charge transport properties of 2+1 dimensional conformal field theories at nonzero temperature. For theories with only Abelian U(1) charges, we describe the action of particle-vortex duality on the hydrodynamic-to-collisionless crossover function: this leads to powerful functional constraints for self-dual theories. For N=8 supersymmetric, SU(N) Yang-Mills theory at the conformal fixed point, exact hydrodynamic-to-collisionless crossover functions of the SO(8) R-currents can be obtained in the large N limit by applying the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence to M theory. In the gravity theory, fluctuating currents are mapped to fluctuating gauge fields in the background of a black hole in 3+1 dimensional anti-de Sitter space. The electromagnetic self-duality of the 3+1 dimensional theory implies that the correlators of the R-currents obey a functional constraint similar to that found from particle-vortex duality in 2+1 dimensional Abelian theories. Thus the 2+1 dimensional, superconformal Yang Mills theory obeys a 'holographic self-duality' in the large N limit, and perhaps more generally.
- OSTI ID:
- 21020432
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 75, Issue 8; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.75.085020; (c) 2007 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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