03.02.2010 (Wednesday)

Viscosity and conductivity in general theories of gravity

Regular Seminar Miguel Paulos (DAMTP, Cambridge)

at:
14:00 IC
room H503
abstract:

Recently there has been great interest in calculating transport coefficients for field theories at large coupling, using AdS/CFT. In this talk I will discuss recent work showing how to use the membrane paradigm to easily compute the shear viscosity and conductivity in arbitrary gravity theories. In a certain sense these can be thought of as effective couplings at the black hole horizon dual to the field theory plasma. An explicit Wald-like formula for these couplings is given for a large class of generalized gravity theories.