Physical response functions of strongly coupled massive quantum liquids

Abstract

We study physical properties of strongly coupled massive quantum liquids from their spectral functions using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The generic model that we consider is dense, heavy fundamental matter coupled to SU (N c ) super Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature above the deconfinement phase transition but below the scale set by the baryon number density. In this setup, we study the currentcurrent correlators of the baryon number density using new techniques that employ a scaling behavior in the dual geometry. Our results, the AC conductivity, the quasi-particle spectrum and the Drude-limit parameters like the relaxation time are simple temperature-independent expressions that depend only on the mass-squared to density ratio and display a crossover between a baryon-and meson-dominated regime. We concentrated on the (2+1)-dimensional defect case, but in principle our results can also be generalized straightforwardly to other cases.