Entanglement and excitations in gauge/gravity duality

Abstract

Gauge/gravity duality, also known as holography, relates quantum field theories to theories of gravity. When one theory is strongly coupled, and therefore difficult to study directly, the other is weakly coupled. In this thesis, we study a variety of phenomena in strongly coupled quantum field theories by performing calculations in their gravitational duals.
We compute entanglement entropy in a variety of holographic systems, paying particular attention to its long-distance behaviour, characterised by a term proportional to surface area. This term is known to decrease along Lorentz-invariant renormalisation group flows, suggesting that it may count massless degrees of freedom. We find that more general deformations may increase this area term, possibly indicating an enhanced number of long-distance degrees of freedom. We observe a correlation between this enhancement and the emergence of new scaling symmetry at long distances.
Next, we study the spectrum of collective excitations in a holographic model of a non-Fermi liquid. At high temperatures, the spectrum of collective excitations includes hydrodynamic sound waves. As in similar models, we observe that sound-like modes also exist at low temperatures. Such modes are known as holographic zero sound. We study the changing properties of holographic zero sound and the emergence of hydrodynamic behaviour at high temperatures as we vary the parameters of the model. We find that for certain values of the parameters, the temperature-dependence of holographic zero sound qualitatively resembles that of a normal Fermi liquid.
Finally, we study the entanglement entropy contribution of surface defects in a six dimensional quantum field theory of relevance to M-theory, which is a candidate theory of quantum gravity. We find that the entanglement entropy does not monotonically decrease along renormalisation group flows on these defects, ruling it out as a potential measure of degrees of freedom. On the other hand, we find that two of the contributions of the defect to the Weyl anomaly of the quantum field theory decrease along all of the flows that we study.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Ronald, James Rodgers: orcid.org/0000-0002-4826-6540

ORCID for Andrew O'bannon: orcid.org/0000-0001-7862-783X

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