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The dynamics when a hot many-body quantum system is brought into instantaneous contact with a cold many-body quantum system can be understood as a combination of early time quantum correlation (von Neumann entropy) gain and late time energy relaxation. We show that at the shortest timescales there is an energy increase in each system linked to the entropy gain, even though equilibrium thermodynamics does not apply. This energy increase is of quantum origin and results from the collective binding energy between the two systems. Counter-intuitively, this implies that also the hotter of the two systems generically experiences an initial energy increase when brought into contact with the other colder system. In the limit where the energy relaxation overwhelms the (quantum) correlation build-up, classical energy dynamics emerges where the energy in the hot system decreases immediately upon contact with a cooler system. We use both strongly correlated SYK systems and weakly correlated mixed field Ising chains to exhibit these characteristics, and comment on its implications for both black hole evaporation and quantum thermodynamics., Comment: Corrected typo in the legend of Fig.5

We consider non-equilibrium dynamics of two initially independent reservoirs $A$ and $B$ filled with a cold Fermi gas coupled and decoupled by two quantum quenches following one another. We find that the von Neumann entropy production induced by the quench is faster than thermal transport between the reservoirs and defines the short-time dynamics of the system. We analyze the energy change in the system which adds up the heat transferred between $A$ and $B$ and the work done by the quench to uncouple the reservoirs. In the case when $A$ and $B$ interact for a short time, we notice an energy increase in both reservoirs upon decoupling. This energy gain results from the quench's work and does not depend on the initial temperature imbalance between the reservoirs. We relate the quench's work to the mutual correlations of $A$ and $B$ expressed through their von Neumann entropies. Utilizing this relation, we show that once $A$ and $B$ become coupled, their entropies grow (on a timescale of the Fermi time) faster than the heat flow within the system. This result may provide a track of quantum correlations' generation at finite temperatures which one may probe in ultracold atoms, where we expect the characteristic timescale of correlations' growth to be $\sim 0.1 {\rm ms}$., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures (published version)

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model describes interacting fermionic zero modes in zero spatial dimensions, e.g. quantum dot, with interactions strong enough to completely washout quasiparticle excitations in the infrared. In this paper, we consider the complex-valued SYK model at initial temperature $T$ and chemical potential $\mu$ coupled to a large reservoir by a quench at time $t=0$. The reservoir is kept at zero temperature and charge neutrality. We find that the dynamics of the discharging process of the SYK quantum dot reveals a distinctive characteristic of the SYK non-Fermi liquid (nFl) state. In particular, we focus on the tunneling current induced by the quench. We show that the temperature dependent contribution to the current's half-life scales linearly in $T$ at low temperatures for the SYK nFl state, while for the Fermi liquid it scales as $T^2$., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

It is presently unknown how strong lattice potentials influence the fermion spectral function of the holographic strange metals predicted by the AdS/CFT correspondence. This embodies a crucial test for the application of holography to condensed matter experiments. We show that for one particular momentum direction this spectrum can be computed for arbitrary strength of the effective translational symmetry breaking potential of the so-called Bianchi-VII geometry employing ordinary differential equations. Deep in the strange metal regime we find rather small changes to the single-fermion response computed by the emergent quantum critical IR, even when the potential becomes relevant in the infra-red. However, in the regime where holographic quasi-particles occur, defining a Fermi surface in the continuum, they acquire a finite lifetime at any finite potential strength. At the transition from irrelevancy to relevancy of the Bianchi potential in the deep infra-red the quasi-particle remnants disappear completely and the fermion spectrum exhibits a purely relaxational behaviour., Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures

We study the Fermi level structure of (2+1)-dimensional strongly interacting electron systems in external magnetic field using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The gravity dual of a finite density fermion system is a Dirac field in the background of the dyonic AdS-Reissner-Nordstrom black hole. In the probe limit the magnetic system can be reduced to the non-magnetic one, with Landau-quantized momenta and rescaled thermodynamical variables. We find that at strong enough magnetic fields, the Fermi surface vanishes and the quasiparticle is lost either through a crossover to conformal regime or through a phase transition to an unstable Fermi surface. In the latter case, the vanishing Fermi velocity at the critical magnetic field triggers the non-Fermi liquid regime with unstable quasiparticles and a change in transport properties of the system. We associate it with a metal-"strange metal" phase transition. We compute the DC Hall and longitudinal conductivities using the gravity-dressed fermion propagators. As expected, the Hall conductivity is quantized according to integer Quantum Hall Effect (QHE) at weak magnetic fields. At strong magnetic fields, new plateaus typical for the fractional QHE appear. Our pattern closely resembles the experimental results on graphite which are described using the fractional filling factor proposed by Halperin., Comment: 39 pages, 11 figures, Ch. 21, Lect. Notes Phys. "Strongly interacting matter in magnetic fields" (Springer), edited by D. Kharzeev, K. Landsteiner, A. Schmitt, H.-U. Yee. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1011.4051

We study the Fermi level structure of 2+1-dimensional strongly interacting electron systems in external magnetic field using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The gravity dual of a finite density fermion system is a Dirac field in the background of the dyonic AdS-Reissner-Nordstrom black hole. In the probe limit the magnetic system can be reduced to the non-magnetic one, with Landau-quantized momenta and rescaled thermodynamical variables. We find that at strong enough magnetic fields, the Fermi surface vanishes and the quasiparticle is lost either through a crossover to conformal regime or through a phase transition to an unstable Fermi surface. In the latter case, the vanishing Fermi velocity at the critical magnetic field triggers the non-Fermi liquid regime with unstable quasiparticles and a change in transport properties of the system. We associate it with a metal-"strange metal" phase transition. Next we compute the DC Hall and longitudinal conductivities using the gravity-dressed fermion propagators. For dual fermions with a large charge, many different Fermi surfaces contribute and the Hall conductivity is quantized as expected for integer Quantum Hall Effect (QHE). At strong magnetic fields, as additional Fermi surfaces open up, new plateaus typical for the fractional QHE appear. The somewhat irregular pattern in the length of fractional QHE plateaus resemble the outcomes of experiments on thin graphite in a strong magnetic field. Finally, motivated by the absence of the sign problem in holography, we suggest a lattice approach to the AdS calculations of finite density systems., Comment: 34 pages, 14 figures

We consider the Soft-Wall-model of AdS/QCD to calculate photon production in strongly coupled Quark Gluon Plasma (sQGP). The IR cut-off only affects the low-frequency-component of the production rate. The full spectral function is determined numerically and shows remarkable similarity to computations of the photon production rate in AdS-duals of $\mathcal{N}=2$ theories with massive flavor. It is further support that Soft-Wall AdS-QCD correctly captures the IR physics of the chiral perturbation theory regime of QCD. We confirm this by relating the IR-effects of the massive flavor deformations to the AdS/QCD soft wall cut-off. The AdS/QCD spectral function is smooth, however, and unlike massive flavor models shows no spectral peaks., Comment: 22 pages, 3 figs; v2: references added, clarifications made and minor corrections

We review how initial state effects generically yield an oscillatory component in the primordial power spectrum of inflationary density perturbations. These oscillatory corrections parametrize unknown new physics at a scale $M$ and are potentially observable if the ratio $H_{infl}/M$ is sufficiently large. We clarify to what extent present and future CMB data analysis can distinguish between the different proposals for initial state corrections., Comment: Invited talk by B. Greene at the XXII Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics, Stanford University, 13-17 December 2004, (TSRA04-0001), 8 pages, LaTeX, some references added, added paragraph at the end of section 2 and an extra note added after the conclusions regarding modifications to the large k power spectra deduced from galaxy surveys

We use the results of hep-th/0007174 on the simple current classification of open unoriented CFTs to construct half supersymmetry preserving crosscap states for rational Calabi-Yau compactifications. We show that the corresponding orientifold fixed planes obey the BPS-like relation M=exp(i*phi)Q. To prove this relation, it is essential that the worldsheet CFT properly includes the degrees of freedom from the uncompactified space-time component. The BPS-phase phi can be identified with the automorphism type of the crosscap states. To illustrate the method we compute crosscap states in Gepner models with each k_i odd., Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX; text corrected and improved; section 4 rewritten and expanded to clarify calculations; results unchanged

We analyze unoriented Wess-Zumino-Witten models from a geometrical point of view. We show that the geometric interpretation of simple current crosscap states is as centre orientifold planes localized on conjugacy classes of the group manifold. We determine the locations and dimensions of these planes for arbitrary simply-connected groups and orbifolds thereof. The dimensions of the O-planes turn out to be given by the dimensions of symmetric coset manifolds based on regular embeddings. Furthermore, we give a geometrical interpretation of boundary conjugation in open unoriented WZW models; it yields D-branes together with their images under the orientifold projection. To find the agreement between O-planes and crosscap states, we find explicit answers for lattice extensions of Gaussian sums. These results allow us to express the modular P-matrix, which is directly related to the crosscap coefficient, in terms of characters of the horizontal subgroup of the affine Lie algebra. A corollary of this relation is that there exists a formal linear relation between the modular P- and the modular S-matrix., Comment: 35 pages LaTeX, 2 tables; Proof added for symmetric space relation; minor improvements; references added

We consider quantum-mechanical path integrals for non-linear sigma models on a circle defined by the string-inspired method of Strassler, where one considers periodic quantum fluctuations about a center-of-mass coordinate. In this approach one finds incorrect answers for the local trace anomalies of the corresponding $n$-dimensional field theories in curved space. The quantum field theory approach to the quantum-mechanical path-integral, where quantum fluctuations are not periodic but vanish at the endpoints, yields the correct answers. We explain these results by a detailed analysis of general coordinate invariance in both methods. Both approaches can be derived from the same operator expression and the integrated trace anomalies in both schemes agree. In the string-inspired method the integrands are not invariant under general coordinate transformations and one is therefore not permitted to use Riemann normal coordinates., Comment: LaTeX, 12 pages, 17 figures

We test the conjectured relationship between N=4 super Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions and IIB supergravity compactified on $AdS_5\times S_5$ by computing the two- and three-point functions of R-symmetry currents. We observe that the integral expressions describing the general three-point correlator on the supergravity side have a structure similar to one-loop triangle diagrams in N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. This allows us to compare the expressions on both sides of the AdS/CFT correspondence without the technical complications of the loop integrations. We confirm that the two- and three-point correspondence arises at only one-loop in the N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. Higher-point functions as well as further three-point functions may be analyzed similarly., Comment: 24 pages, latex, minor corrections, publication in NPB