Diagonal and Hall holographic conductivities dual to a bulk condensate of magnetic monopoles

Abstract

By employing the holographic operator mixing technique to deal with coupled perturbations in the gauge/gravity duality, I numerically compute the real and imaginary parts of the diagonal and Hall AC conductivities in a strongly coupled quantum field theory dual to a bulk condensate of magnetic monopoles. The results obtained show that a conclusion previously derived in the literature, namely, the vanishing of holographic DC conductivities in 3-dimensional strongly coupled quantum field theories dual to a 4-dimensional bulk magnetic monopole condensate, also applies to the calculation of diagonal and Hall conductivities in the presence of a topological $\theta$-term. Therefore, the condensation of magnetic monopoles in the bulk is suggested as a rather general and robust mechanism to generate dual strongly coupled quantum field theories with zero DC conductivities. The interplay between frequency, $\theta$-angle and the characteristic mass scale of the monopole condensate on the results for the conductivities is also investigated.

22 pages, 12 figures, version accepted for publication in European Physical Journal C