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Heavy fermion alloys at critical doping typically exhibit non-Fermi-liquid behavior at low temperatures, including a logarithmic or power law rise in the ratio of specific heat to temperature as the temperature is lowered. Anomalous specific heat of this type is also observed in a simple class of gravitational dual models that exhibit anisotropic scaling with dynamical critical exponent z > 1.

We consider gravity duals to d+1 dimensional quantum critical points with anisotropic scaling. The primary motivation comes from strongly correlated electron systems in condensed matter theory but the main focus of the present paper is on the gravity models in their own right. Physics at finite temperature and fixed charge density is described in terms of charged black branes. Some exact solutions are known and can be used to obtain a maximally extended spacetime geometry, which has a null curvature singularity inside a single non-degenerate horizon, but generic black brane solutions in the model can only be obtained numerically. Charged matter gives rise to black branes with hair that are dual to the superconducting phase of a holographic superconductor. Our numerical results indicate that holographic superconductors with anisotropic scaling have vanishing zero temperature entropy when the back reaction of the hair on the brane geometry is taken into account.