Zero Temperature Dissipation and Holography

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dissipation behaves at zero temperature in strongly coupled conformal field theories using holography, revealing a non-smooth limit linked to phase transitions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the zero-temperature limit of dissipation in holographic models is non-smooth and relates this to confinement-deconfinement phase transitions.

Findings

Dissipation at zero temperature differs from the T=0 case for small frequencies.

The T→0 limit is not smooth for frequencies smaller than temperature.

A connection between dissipation behavior and phase transitions is identified.

Abstract

We use holographic techniques to study the zero-temperature limit of dissipation for a Brownian particle moving in a strongly coupled CFT at finite temperature in various space-time dimensions. The dissipative term in the boundary theory for $\omega\to 0$, $T \to 0$ with $\omega / T$ held small and fixed, does not match the same at $T=0$, $\omega \to 0$. Thus the $T\to 0$ limit is not smooth for $\omega < T$. This phenomenon appears to be related to a confinement-deconfinement phase transition at $T=0$ in the field theory.