Yasha Neiman

Relativistic Hydrodynamics with General Anomalous Charges

We consider the hydrodynamic regime of gauge theories with general triangle anomalies, where the participating currents may be global or gauged, abelian or non-abelian. We generalize the argument of arXiv:0906.5044, and construct at the viscous order the stress-energy tensor, the charge currents and the entropy current.

Anomalies in superfluids and a chiral electric effect

We analyze the chiral transport terms in relativistic superfluid hydrodynamics. In addition to the spontaneously broken symmetry current, we consider an arbitrary number of unbroken symmetries and extend the results of arXiv:1105.3733. We suggest an interpretation of some of the new transport coefficients in terms of chiral and gravitational anomalies. In particular, we show that with unbroken gauged charges in the system, one can observe a chiral electric conductivity — a current in a perpendicular direction to the applied electric field. We present a motivated proposal for the value of the associated transport coefficient, linking it to the triangle anomaly. Along the way we present new arguments regarding the interpretation of the anomalous transport coefficients in normal fluids. We propose a natural generalization of the chiral transport terms to the case of an arbitrary number of spontaneously broken symmetry currents.

Imaginary action, spinfoam asymptotics and the ?transplanckian? regime of loop quantum gravity

It was recently noted that the on-shell Einstein?Hilbert action with York?Gibbons?Hawking boundary term has an imaginary part, proportional to the area of the codimension-2 surfaces on which the boundary normal becomes null. We discuss the extension of this result to first-order formulations of gravity. As a side effect, we settle the issue of the Holst modification versus the Nieh?Yan density by demanding a variational principle with suitable boundary conditions. We then set out to find the imaginary action in the large-spin 4-simplex limit of the Lorentzian EPRL/FK spinfoam. It turns out that the spinfoam?s effective action indeed has the correct imaginary part, but only if the Barbero?Immirzi parameter ? is set to ?i after the quantum calculation. We point out an agreement between this effective action and a recent black hole state-counting calculation in the same limit. Finally, we propose that the large-spin limit of loop quantum gravity can be viewed as a high-energy ?transplanckian? regime.

Fluid/Gravity Correspondence, Local Wald Entropy Current and Gravitational Anomaly

A bstractWe propose, in the framework of the fluid/gravity correspondence, a definition for a local horizon entropy current for higher-curvature gravitational theories. The current is well-defined to first order in fluid gradients for general gravity actions with an algebraic dependence on the Riemann tensor. As a detailed example, we consider five-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory with a mixed gauge-gravitational Chern-Simons term. In this theory, we construct the proposed entropy current on a charged black-brane background, and show that it has a non-negative divergence. Moreover, a complete correspondence between the charged black-brane horizon’s dynamics and the hydrodynamics of an anomalous four-dimensional field theory is established. Our proposed entropy current is then found to coincide with the entropy current of the anomalous field theory fluid.

Holographic Non-Abelian Charged Hydrodynamics from the Dynamics of Null Horizons

We analyze the dynamics of a four-dimensional null hypersurface in a five-dimensional bulk spacetime with Einstein-Yang-Mills fields. In an appropriate ansatz, the projection of the field equations onto the hypersurface takes the form of conservation laws for relativistic hydrodynamics with global non-abelian charges. A Chern-Simons term in the bulk action corresponds to anomalies in the global charges, with a vorticity term arising in the hydrodynamics. We derive the entropy current and obtain unique expressions for some of the leading-order transport coefficients (in the abelian case, all of them) for arbitrary equations of state. As a special case and a concrete example, we discuss the event horizon of a boosted Einstein-Yang-Mills black brane in an asymptotically Anti-de-Sitter spacetime. The evolution equations in that case describe the hydrodynamic limit of a conformal field theory with anomalous global non-abelian charges on the Anti-de-Sitter boundary.

Holographic de Sitter Geometry from Entanglement in Conformal Field Theory

We demonstrate that, for general conformal field theories (CFTs), the entanglement for small perturbations of the vacuum is organized in a novel holographic way. For spherical entangling regions in a constant time slice, perturbations in the entanglement entropy are solutions of a Klein-Gordon equation in an auxiliary de Sitter (dS) spacetime. The role of the emergent timelike direction in dS spacetime is played by the size of the entangling sphere. For CFTs with extra conserved charges, e.g., higher-spin charges, we show that each charge gives rise to a separate dynamical scalar field in dS spacetime.

Wald entropy formula and loop quantum gravity

We outline how the Wald entropy formula naturally arises in loop quantum gravity based on recently introduced dimension-independent connection variables. The key observation is that in a loop quantization of a generalized gravity theory, the analog of the area operator turns out to measure, morally speaking, the Wald entropy rather than the area. We discuss the explicit example of (higher-dimensional) Lanczos-Lovelock gravity and comment on recent work on finding the correct numerical prefactor of the entropy by comparing it to a semiclassical effective action.

Horizon complementarity in elliptic de Sitter space

We study a quantum field in elliptic de Sitter space dS_4/Z_2 - the spacetime obtained from identifying antipodal points in dS_4. We find that the operator algebra and Hilbert space cannot be defined for the entire space, but only for observable causal patches. This makes the system into an explicit realization of the horizon complementarity principle. In the absence of a global quantum theory, we propose a recipe for translating operators and states between observers. This translation involves information loss, in accordance with the fact that two observers see different patches of the spacetime. As a check, we recover the thermal state at the de Sitter temperature as a state that appears the same to all observers. This thermal state arises from the same functional that, in ordinary dS_4, describes the Bunch-Davies vacuum.

Antipodally symmetric gauge fields and higher-spin gravity in de Sitter space

A bstractWe study gauge fields of arbitrary spin in de Sitter space. These include Yang-Mills fields and gravitons, as well as the higher-spin fields of Vasiliev theory. We focus on antipodally symmetric solutions to the field equations, i.e. ones that live on “elliptic” de Sitter space dS4/ℤ2