Studying a charged quark gluon plasma via holography and higher derivative corrections

TL;DR

This paper calculates finite coupling corrections to charged observables in a strongly coupled plasma using holography, revealing that previous larger corrections are significantly reduced, implying that infinite coupling results are robust.

Contribution

The study derives corrected equations of motion for gauge fields in holography, correcting previous errors and showing smaller finite coupling effects on plasma observables.

Findings

Finite coupling corrections to conductivity are smaller than previously thought.

Quasinormal mode frequencies are less affected by finite coupling.

Spectral densities and photoemission rates show minimal deviation from infinite coupling results.

Abstract

We compute finite 't Hooft coupling corrections to observables related to charged quantities in a strongly coupled $\mathcal{N}=4$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma. The coupling corrected equations of motion of gauge fields are explicitly derived and differ from findings of previous works, which contained several small errors with large impact. As a consequence the $\mathcal{O}(\gamma)$-corrections to the observables considered, including the conductivity, quasinormal mode frequencies, in and off equilibrium spectral density and photoemission rates, become much smaller. This suggests that infinite coupling results obtained within AdS/CFT are little modified for the real QCD coupling strength.