The unconditional RG flow of the relativistic holographic fluid

TL;DR

This paper investigates the radial evolution of holographic fluids in Einstein gravity, showing that the RG flow corresponds to field redefinitions of hydrodynamic variables and remains consistent with relativistic covariance, with specific results on viscosity and sound speed.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the RG flow of relativistic holographic fluids can be described by boundary field redefinitions without imposing boundary conditions, and analyzes the invariance of viscosity and divergence of sound speed at the horizon.

Findings

The shear viscosity to entropy ratio remains constant along the RG flow.

The RG flow can be characterized by field redefinitions of hydrodynamic variables.

The speed of sound diverges at the horizon.

Abstract

We study asymptotically slowly varying perturbations of the AdS black brane in Einstein's gravity with a negative cosmological constant. We allow both the induced metric and the Brown-York stress tensor at a given radial cut-off slice to fluctuate. These fluctuations, which determine the radial evolution of the metric, are parametrized in terms of boundary data. We observe that the renormalized energy-momentum tensor at any radial slice takes the standard hydrodynamic form which is relativistically covariant with respect to the induced metric. The RG flow of the fluid takes the form of field redefinitions of the boundary hydrodynamic variables. To show this, up to first order in the derivative expansion, we only need to investigate the radial flow of the boundary data and do not need to impose constraints on them. Imposing the constraints gives unforced nonlinear hydrodynamic equations at any radial slice. Along the way we make a careful study of the choice of counter-terms and hypersurfaces involved in defining the holographic RG flow, while at the same time we do not explicitly set any boundary condition either at the cut-off or at the horizon. We find that \eta/s does not change along the RG flow, equaling 1/(4\pi) when the future horizon is regular. We also analyze the flow of the speed of sound and find that it diverges at the horizon.