Hydrodynamic Fluctuations, Long-time Tails, and Supersymmetry

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that hydrodynamic fluctuations in supersymmetric theories lead to long-time power-law tails in correlation functions, similar to simple fluids, with implications for testing the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Contribution

It reveals the presence of long-time tails in supersymmetric theories' correlation functions and discusses their suppression and origin in gravitational duals.

Findings

Long-time tails behave as t^{-3/2} in supersymmetric theories.

The tails are suppressed by 1/N_c^2, affecting their detectability.

These tails can serve as tests for the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Abstract

Hydrodynamic fluctuations at non-zero temperature can cause slow relaxation toward equilibrium even in observables which are not locally conserved. A classic example is the stress-stress correlator in a normal fluid, which, at zero wavenumber, behaves at large times as t^{-3/2}. A novel feature of the effective theory of hydrodynamic fluctuations in supersymmetric theories is the presence of Grassmann-valued classical fields describing macroscopic supercharge density fluctuations. We show that hydrodynamic fluctuations in supersymmetric theories generate essentially the same long-time power-law tails in real-time correlation functions that are known in simple fluids. In particular, a t^{-3/2} long-time tail must exist in the stress-stress correlator of N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory at non-zero temperature, regardless of the value of the coupling. Consequently, this feature of finite-temperature dynamics can provide an interesting test of the AdS/CFT correspondence. However, the coefficient of this long-time tail is suppressed by a factor of 1/N_c^2. On the gravitational side, this implies that these long-time tails are not present in the classical supergravity limit; they must instead be produced by one-loop gravitational fluctuations.