Thermal diffusivity and chaos in metals without quasiparticles

Abstract

We study the thermal diffusivity $D_T$ in models of metals without quasiparticle excitations (`strange metals'). The many-body quantum chaos and transport properties of such metals can be efficiently described by a holographic representation in a gravitational theory in an emergent curved spacetime with an additional spatial dimension. We find that at generic infra-red fixed points $D_T$ is always related to parameters characterizing many-body quantum chaos: the butterfly velocity $v_B$, and Lyapunov time ${\tau }_L$ through $D_T\sim v_B^2{\tau }_L$. The relationship holds independently of the charge density, periodic potential strength or magnetic field at the fixed point. The generality of this result follows from the observation that the thermal conductivity of strange metals depends only on the metric near the horizon of a black hole in the emergent spacetime, and is otherwise insensitive to the profile of any matter fields.

27 pages

References in corpus (20)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• An Investigation of AdS${}_2$ Backreaction and Holography
• Effective Holographic Theories for low-temperature condensed matter systems
• Universality of the hydrodynamic limit in AdS/CFT and the membrane paradigm
• Theory of universal incoherent metallic transport
• Slow scrambling in disordered quantum systems
• Holography without translational symmetry
• Momentum dissipation and effective theories of coherent and incoherent transport
• Holography of Dyonic Dilaton Black Branes
• Thermoelectric DC conductivities from black hole horizons
• Quantum chaos on a critical Fermi surface
• Quantum Critical Transport and the Hall Angle
• The thermoelectric properties of inhomogeneous holographic lattices
• Collective cyclotron motion of the relativistic plasma in graphene
• Quantum critical lines in holographic phases with (un)broken symmetry
• Diffusion and Chaos from near AdS${}_2$ horizons
• Holographic RG flow of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in strongly coupled anisotropic plasma
• Charge diffusion and the butterfly effect in striped holographic matter
• A Strongly Coupled Anisotropic Fluid From Dilaton Driven Holography
• Entangled Dilaton Dyons

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Tunable Quantum Chaos in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Model Coupled to a Thermal Bath
• Correlators in the $\mathcal{N}=2$ Supersymmetric SYK Model
• On the Butterfly Effect in 3D Gravity
• Diffusion in inhomogeneous media
• Constraints on hydrodynamics from many-body quantum chaos