Viscosity bound violation in higher derivative gravity

2007/12/31 by Mauro Brigante, Hong Liu, Robert C. Myers +3 · 570 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Classical mechanics #Conformal map #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Curvature #Entropy (arrow of time) #Gauss–Bonnet gravity #Geometry #Gravitation #Mathematical analysis #Mathematical physics #Mathematics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Shear viscosity #Theoretical physics #Thermodynamics #Upper and lower bounds #Viscosity #gr-qc #hep-ph #hep-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.77.126006

published in Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields 77(12) (American Physical Society) · 23 pages, 2 figures; v2: typos corrected, references added, notes added; v3: subsections IV.C and IV.D eliminated, comments on the null energy condition eliminated, minor revisions made

openalex publication_date 2008/06/11 · arxiv created 2008/06/13 · arxiv updated 2010/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Motivated by the vast string landscape, we consider the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in conformal field theories dual to Einstein gravity with curvature square corrections. After field redefinitions these theories reduce to Gauss-Bonnet gravity, which has special properties that allow us to compute the shear viscosity nonperturbatively in the Gauss-Bonnet coupling. By tuning of the coupling, the value of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio can be adjusted to any positive value from infinity down to zero, thus violating the conjectured viscosity bound. At linear order in the coupling, we also check consistency of four different methods to calculate the shear viscosity, and we find that all of them agree. We search for possible pathologies associated with this class of theories violating the viscosity bound.

Citations

• Effect of shear viscosity on spectra, elliptic flow, and Hanbury Brown–Twiss radii
• From AdS/CFT correspondence to hydrodynamics. II. Sound waves
• Superluminal Behavior, Causality, and Instability
• A sticky business: the status of the conjectured viscosity/entropy density bound
• Bound on viscosity and the generalized second law of thermodynamics
• Minkowski-space correlators in AdS/CFT correspondence: recipe and applications
• Simulating elliptic flow with viscous hydrodynamics
• Viscosity Information from Relativistic Nuclear Collisions: How Perfect is the Fluid Observed at RHIC?
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• Viscosity, Black Holes, and Quantum Field Theory
• Thermodynamic and gravitational instability on hyperbolic spaces
• Causality, Analyticity and an IR Obstruction to UV Completion
• Shear Viscosity of Strongly CoupledN<mml:mspace/>=<mml:mspace/>4Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Plasma
• The Large-N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity
• Lorentz violation and perpetual motion
• Flux compactification
• The large N limit of superconformal field theories and supergravity

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