Non-vanishing normal density in cold holographic superfluids

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of normal charge density in holographic superfluids near quantum critical points, revealing conditions under which it remains finite at zero temperature, with implications for superfluid systems and superconductors.

Contribution

It provides a detailed holographic analysis of the normal charge density in superfluids with Lifshitz scaling, extending previous results to new regimes and clarifying earlier conflicting findings.

Findings

Normal charge density remains finite at zero temperature for certain Lifshitz exponents.

Extended the understanding of superfluid behavior near quantum critical points.

Connected holographic results to experimental observations in cuprate superconductors.

Abstract

The low energy and finite temperature excitations of a $d+1$-dimensional system exhibiting superfluidity are well described by a hydrodynamic model with two fluid flows: a normal flow and a superfluid flow. In the vicinity of a quantum critical point, thermodynamics and transport in the system are expected to be controlled by the critical exponents and by the spectrum of irrelevant deformations away from the quantum critical point. Here, using gauge-gravity duality, we present the low temperature dependence of thermodynamic and charge transport coefficients at first order in the hydrodynamic derivative expansion in terms of the critical exponents. Special attention will be paid to the behavior of the charge density of the normal flow in systems with emergent infrared conformal and Lifshitz symmetries, parameterized by a Lifshitz dynamical exponent $z>1$. When $1\leq z<d+2$, we recover ($z=1$) and extend ($z>1$) previous results obtained by relativistic effective field theory techniques. Instead, when $z>d+2$, we show that the normal charge density becomes non-vanishing at zero temperature. An extended appendix generalizes these results to systems that violate hyperscaling as well as systems with generalized photon masses. Our results clarify previous work in the holographic literature and have relevance to recent experimental measurements of the superfluid density on cuprate superconductors.