High Energy Physics

In 2014 Hartnoll proposed that the diffusion constants of incoherent metals should be bounded as $ D \geq \hbar v^2/ (k_B T)$, where v is a characteristic velocity. In this talk I will describe a large class of holographic theories that saturate such a bound, with $v$ being the velocity of the butterfly effect. Our results suggest a novel connection between transport at strong coupling and the field of quantum chaos.

Non-relativistic geometries that violate hyperscaling have been used as holographic laboratories for probing strongly coupled phases with anomalous scalings. In this talk I will discuss holographic computations of DC conductivities in gravitational systems that exhibit such scalings, and allow for momentum dissipation. I will also comment on the cases in which one obtains a linear temperature dependence for the resistivity.

Ultracold atomic Fermi gases near Feshbach resonances or in optical lattices realize paradigmatic, strongly interacting forms of fermionic matter. Topological excitations and spin-charge correlations can be directly imaged in real time. In resonant fermionic superfluids, we observe the cascade of solitonic excitations following a pi phase imprint. A planar soliton decays, via the snake instability, into vortex rings and long-lived solitonic vortices. For fermions in optical lattices, realizing the Fermi-Hubbard model, we detect charge and antiferromagnetic spin correlations with single-site resolution. At low fillings, the Pauli and correlation hole is directly revealed. In the Mott insulating state, we observe strong doublon-hole correlations, which should play an important role for transport.

I enumerate the cases in 2d CFT when the modular hamiltonian (log of the reduced density matrix) may be written as an appropriate integral over the energy-momentum tensor times a local weight. This includes known examples as well as new time-dependent ones. In all these cases the entanglement spectrum is that of an appropriate boundary CFT. I point out the obstruction to the existence of such a result for more complicated bipartitions of the space. This is joint work with Erik Tonni