English

Shear Viscosity at Infinite Coupling: A Field Theory Calculation

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-12-23 v3 Strongly Correlated Electrons High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Nuclear Theory

Abstract

I derive an exact integral expression for the ratio of shear viscosity over entropy density ηs\frac{\eta}{s} for the massless (critical) O(N) model at large N with quartic interactions. The calculation is set up and performed entirely from the field theory side using a non-perturbative resummation scheme that captures all contributions to leading order in large N. In 2+1d, ηs\frac{\eta}{s} is evaluated numerically at all values of the coupling. For infinite coupling, I find ηs0.42(1)×N\frac{\eta}{s}\simeq 0.42(1)\times N. I show that this strong coupling result for the viscosity is universal for a large class of interacting bosonic O(N) models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.06435,
  title  = {Shear Viscosity at Infinite Coupling: A Field Theory Calculation},
  author = {Paul Romatschke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.06435},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

6 pages, 1 figure plus supplemental material; v2: fixed typos and buggy code for (84) in v1, corrected eta/s values; v3: typo in (9) corrected, Fig.1 updated (no change in results)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T01:08:11.418Z