Holo Club: ‘Holographic fluids with higher-form symmetries’

Speaker: André Oliveira (Heriot-Watt University)

Venue & Time: Grey Room 3 / 11:30

Abstract: Higher-form symmetries are ubiquitous in physics. In this talk, I focus on the case where they are continuous and encode the conservation of extended objects. Applications include elasticity, superfluidity and phases of electromagnetism. Using holography, we explore effective descriptions of systems with the simplest case of a single higher-form symmetry. For energies well below temperature, these descriptions admit a (potentially extended) hydrodynamic regime. We verify this explicitly by studying AlAdS black branes charged under higher-form potentials. In particular, we compute quasinormal modes, starting with the low-density limit. Then, we focus on the bulk dual of a viscoelastic system and analyse instabilities for different equilibrium states corresponding to isotropic crystalline phases.