Incoherent thermal transport from dirty black holes

TL;DR

This paper investigates thermal transport in strongly disordered, strongly interacting quantum systems using holography, deriving bounds on thermal conductivity and showing it remains finite in two-dimensional models with bounded dilaton potential.

Contribution

It provides the first geometric derivation of bounds on thermal conductivity in disordered holographic models, highlighting the persistence of finite thermal conductivity in 2D.

Findings

Thermal conductivity is bounded from below in disordered holographic models.

In 2D, thermal conductivity remains non-zero at finite temperature.

Derived geometric bounds apply to strongly coupled, disordered quantum systems.

Abstract

We study thermal transport in strongly disordered, strongly interacting quantum field theories without quasiparticles using gauge-gravity duality. We analyze linear perturbations of black holes with broken translational symmetry in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton theories of gravity. Using general geometric arguments in the bulk, we derive bounds on thermal conductivity for the dual disordered field theories in one and two spatial dimensions. In the latter case, the thermal conductivity is always non-zero at finite temperature, so long as the dilaton potential is bounded from below. Hence, generic holographic models make non-trivial predictions about the thermal conductivity in a strongly disordered, strongly coupled metal in two spatial dimensions.