The Chern-Simons diffusion rate from higher curvature gravity

Abstract

An important transport coefficient in the study of non-Abelian plasmas is the Chern-Simons diffusion rate, which parameterizes the rate of transition among the degenerate vacua of a gauge theory. We compute this quantity at strong coupling, via holography, using two theories of gravity with higher curvature corrections, namely Gauss-Bonnet gravity and quasi-topological gravity. We find that these corrections may either increase or decrease the result obtained from Einstein's gravity, depending on the value of the couplings. The Chern-Simons diffusion rate for Gauss-Bonnet gravity decreases as the shear viscosity over entropy ratio is increased.

9 pages, 1 figure; v2: minor changes, added references

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