2002/10/31 by G. Policastro, D. T. Son, A. O. Starinets · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-th #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2002/12/054
published as JHEP 0212:054,2002 · 18 pages, 2 figures; typos in eqs. 3.4d and 3.5d corrected
arxiv created 2005/07/26 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
As a non-trivial check of the non-supersymmetric gauge/gravity duality, we use a near-extremal black brane background to compute the retarded Green's functions of the stress-energy tensor in N=4 super-Yang-Mills (SYM) theory at finite temperature. For the long-distance, low-frequency modes of the diagonal components of the stress-energy tensor, hydrodynamics predicts the existence of a pole in the correlators corresponding to propagation of sound waves in the N=4 SYM plasma. The retarded Green's functions obtained from gravity do indeed exhibit this pole, with the correct values for the sound speed and the rate of attenuation.