Juan F. Pedraza

Holographic entanglement entropy and the extended phase structure of STU black holes

A bstractWe study the extended thermodynamics, obtained by considering the cosmological constant as a thermodynamic variable, of STU black holes in 4-dimensions in the fixed charge ensemble. The associated phase structure is conjectured to be dual to an RG-flow on the space of field theories. We find that for some charge configurations the phase structure resembles that of a Van der Waals gas: the system exhibits a family of first order phase transitions ending in a second order phase transition at a critical temperature. We calculate the holographic entanglement entropy for several charge configurations and show that for the cases where the gravity background exhibits Van der Waals behavior, the entanglement entropy presents a transition at the same critical temperature. To further characterize the phase transition we calculate appropriate critical exponents and show that they coincide. Thus, the entanglement entropy successfully captures the information of the extended phase structure. Finally, we discuss the physical interpretation of the extended space in terms of the boundary QFT and construct various holographic heat engines dual to STU black holes.

Quantum Fluctuations and the Unruh effect in strongly-coupled conformal field theories

Through the AdS/CFT correspondence, we study a uniformly accelerated quark in the vacuum of strongly-coupled conformal field theories in various dimensions, and determine the resulting stochastic fluctuations of the quark trajectory. From the perspective of an inertial observer, these are quantum fluctuations induced by the gluonic radiation emitted by the accelerated quark. From the point of view of the quark itself, they originate from the thermal medium predicted by the Unruh effect. We scrutinize the relation between these two descriptions in the gravity side of the correspondence, and show in particular that upon transforming the conformal field theory from Rindler space to the open Einstein universe, the acceleration horizon disappears from the boundary theory but is preserved in the bulk. This transformation allows us to directly connect our calculation of radiation-induced fluctuations in vacuum with the analysis by de Boer et al. of the Brownian motion of a quark that is on average static within a thermal medium. Combining this same bulk transformation with previous results of Emparan, we are also able to compute the stress-energy tensor of the Unruh thermal medium.

Quantum Fluctuations in Holographic Theories with Hyperscaling Violation

In this short note we use holographic methods to study the response of quantum critical points with hyperscaling violation to a disturbance caused by a massive charged particle. We give analytical expressions for the two-point functions of the fluctuations of the massive probe as a function of arbitrary (allowed) values of the hyperscaling violation exponent {\theta} and the dynamical exponent z. We point out the existence of markedly different behaviors of the two-point functions in the parameter space of {\theta} and z at late times. In particular, as expected, the late-time dynamics of the probe becomes independent of its inertial mass in the range z+2{\theta}/d>2.

Holographic lessons for quark dynamics

We give a brief overview of recent results obtained through the gauge/gravity correspondence, concerning the propagation of a heavy quark in strongly-coupled conformal field theories (such as N = 4 super-Yang-Mills), both at zero and finite temperature. In the vacuum, we discuss energy loss, radiation damping, signal propagation and radiation-induced fluctuations. In the presence of a thermal plasma, our emphasis is on early-time energy loss, screening and quark-antiquark evolution after pair creation. Throughout, quark dynamics is seen to be efficiently encapsulated in the usual string worldsheet dynamics.

Entanglement and out-of-equilibrium dynamics in holographic models of de Sitter QFTs

A bstractIn this paper we study various aspects of entanglement entropy in strongly- coupled de Sitter quantum field theories in various dimensions. We focus on gravity solutions that are dual to field theories in a fixed de Sitter background, both in equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium configurations. The latter corresponds to the Vaidya generalization of the AdS black hole solutions with hyperbolic topology. We compute analytically the entanglement entropy of spherical regions and show that there is a transition when the sphere is as big as the horizon. We also explore thermalization in time-dependent situations in which the system evolves from a non-equilibrium state to the Bunch-Davies state. We find that the saturation time is equal to the light-crossing time of the sphere. This behavior is faster than random walk and suggests the existence of free light-like degrees of freedom.

Strong subadditivity, null energy condition and charged black holes

A bstractUsing the Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi (HRT) conjectured formula for entanglement entropy in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence with time-dependent backgrounds, we investigate the relation between the bulk null energy condition (NEC) of the stress-energy tensor with the strong sub-additivity (SSA) property of entanglement entropy in the boundary theory. In a background that interpolates between an AdS to an AdS-Reissner-Nordstrom-type geometry, we find that generically there always exists a critical surface beyond which the violation of NEC would naively occur. However, the extremal area surfaces that determine the entanglement entropy for the boundary theory, can penetrate into this forbidden region only for certain choices for the mass and the charge functions in the background. This penetration is then perceived as the violation of SSA in the boundary theory. We also find that this happens only when the critical surface lies above the apparent horizon, but not otherwise. We conjecture that SSA, which is thus non- trivially related to NEC, also characterizes the entire time-evolution process along which the dual field theory may thermalize.

Aspects of current correlators in holographic theories with hyperscaling violation

We study the low energy and low momentum behavior of current correlators in a class of holographic zero-temperature finite density critical theories which do not respect the hyperscaling relation. The dual holographic description is assumed to be given by probe D-branes embedded in background geometries characterized by a dynamical critical exponent

Weak field collapse in AdS: introducing a charge density

z

Evolution of nonlocal observables in an expanding boost-invariant plasma

and a hyperscaling violation exponent

Holographic EPR pairs, wormholes and radiation

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