Effective Actions, Phase Transitions and Holography

Abstract

The gauge/gravity duality, or holography, is a versatile tool to study the strongly coupled dynamics of gauge theory matter. One of areas were the holographic principle shows its strengths is in the computation of the phase diagram of quantum field theories with known gravity duals. For certain realisations of the duality, the field theory enjoys non-trivial phase diagrams, including phase transitions of different degrees. The goal of this project is to determine the effective action of a particular class of models and to relate this effective action to their known phase structure.

Advisors
Jorge Casalderrey Solana
References

1) Effective actions and bubble nucleation from holography

Fëanor Reuben Ares, Oscar Henriksson, Mark Hindmarsh, Carlos Hoyos, Niko Jokela, 2109.13784 [hep-th]

2) Phase Transitions, Inhomogeneous Horizons and Second-Order Hydrodynamics, Attems et al, JHEP 06 (2017) 129 • e-Print: 1703.02948 [hep-th]

3) Thermodynamics, transport and relaxation in non-conformal theories, Attems et al, JHEP 10 (2016) 155 • e-Print: 1603.01254 [hep-th]