Complexified quasinormal modes and the pole-skipping in a holographic system at finite chemical potential

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to analyze quasinormal modes in a holographic system at finite chemical potential, revealing how pole collisions determine hydrodynamic convergence and how pole-skipping relates to quantum chaos.

Contribution

It introduces a non-perturbative approach to study coupled gauge-invariant fluctuations and connects pole collisions with the convergence of hydrodynamic expansions in holography.

Findings

Hydrodynamic and non-hydrodynamic pole collisions occur at specific complex momenta.

The radius of convergence of the hydrodynamic sound mode is set by pole collision points.

Pole-skipping points encode information about quantum chaos.

Abstract

We develop a method to study coupled dynamics of gauge-invariant variables, constructed out of metric and gauge field fluctuations on the background of a AdS$_5$ Reissner-Nordstr\"om black brane. Using this method, we compute the numerical spectrum of quasinormal modes associated with fluctuations of spin 0, 1 and 2, non-perturbatively in $\mu/T$. We also analytically compute the spectrum of hydrodynamic excitations in the small chemical potential limit. Then, by studying the spectral curve at complex momenta in every spin channel, we numerically find points at which hydrodynamic and non-hydrodynamic poles collide. We discuss the relation between such collision points and the convergence radius of the hydrodynamic derivative expansion. Specifically in the spin 0 channel, we find that within the range $1.1\lesssim \mu/T\lesssim 2$, the radius of convergence of the hydrodynamic sound mode is set by the absolute value of the complex momentum corresponding to the point at which the sound pole collides with the hydrodynamic diffusion pole. It shows that in holographic systems at finite chemical potential, the convergence of the hydrodynamic derivative expansion in the mentioned range is fully controlled by hydrodynamic information. As the last result, we explicitly show that the relevant information about quantum chaos in our system can be extracted from the pole-skipping points of energy density response function. We find a threshold value for $\mu/T$, lower than which the pole-skipping points can be computed perturbatively in a derivative expansion.