Damping of Pseudo-Goldstone Fields

Abstract

Approximate symmetries abound in Nature. If these symmetries are also spontaneously broken, the would-be Goldstone modes acquire a small mass, or inverse correlation length, and are referred to as pseudo-Goldstones. At nonzero temperature, the effects of dissipation can be captured by hydrodynamics at sufficiently long scales compared to the local equilibrium. Here we show that in the limit of weak explicit breaking, locality of hydrodynamics implies that the damping of pseudo-Goldstones is completely determined by their mass and diffusive transport coefficients. We present many applications: superfluids, QCD in the chiral limit, Wigner crystal and density wave phases in the presence of an external magnetic field or not, nematic phases and (anti-)ferromagnets. For electronic density wave phases, pseudo-Goldstone damping generates a contribution to the resistivity independent of the strength of disorder, which can have a linear temperature dependence provided the associated diffusivity saturates a bound. This is reminiscent of the phenomenology of strange metal high $T_c$ superconductors, where charge density waves are observed across the phase diagram.

v2: new appendix, references added, typos fixed, matches published version; v1: 5+ pages + appendices

References in corpus (12)

• Theory of universal incoherent metallic transport
• Hydrodynamics of spin currents
• Hydrodynamics of ideal fracton fluids
• Charge order at high temperature in cuprate superconductors
• Gapless and gapped holographic phonons
• Transport and hydrodynamics in the chiral limit
• Magnetophonons & type-B Goldstones from Hydrodynamics to Holography
• Pseudo-spontaneous $U(1)$ Symmetry Breaking in Hydrodynamics and Holography
• Holographic pinning
• Hydrodynamic magneto-transport in charge density wave states
• Dissipation in Holographic Superfluids
• Incoherent hydrodynamics of density waves in magnetic fields

Cited by in corpus (22)

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• T-linear resistivity, optical conductivity and Planckian transport for a holographic local quantum critical metal in a periodic potential
• Inability of linear axion holographic Gubser-Rocha model to capture all the transport anomalies of strange metals
• Hydrodynamics of plastic deformations in electronic crystals
• On the hydrodynamics of (2 + 1)-dimensional strongly coupled relativistic theories in an external magnetic field
• Zero sound and higher-form symmetries in compressible holographic phases
• Breaking rotations without violating the KSS viscosity bound
• Dissipative fracton superfluids
• Restoring time-reversal covariance in relaxed hydrodynamics
• Long-time tails in the SYK chain from the effective field theory with a large number of derivatives
• Transverse Goldstone mode in holographic fluids with broken translations
• Hydrodynamics of thermal active matter
• Hydrodynamics of a relativistic charged fluid in the presence of a periodically modulated chemical potential
• Universality of pseudo-Goldstone damping near critical points
• Thermoelectric transport properties of gapless pinned charge density waves
• Floquet-engineered Emergent Massive Nambu-Goldstone Modes
• Boost-invariant superfluid flows
• Kinetics of hydrodynamic pions in chiral perturbation theory
• Emergent structures in open EFTs