Related papers: Viscosity, entanglement and acceleration
It is known that the Minkowski vacuum appears as a thermal medium to an accelerated observer due to the renowned Unruh effect. More recently, it has been shown that at least for lower-spin fields this medium also exhibits a non-zero…
We present evidence that the universal Kovtun-Son-Starinets shear viscosity to entropy density ratio of 1/4\pi can be associated with a Rindler causal horizon in flat spacetime. Since there is no known holographic (gauge/gravity) duality…
We demonstrate that the unitarity of quantum field theory, through the positivity of spectral functions, underlies thermodynamic irreversibility for a subsystem separated by a horizon, in direct analogy with the irreversibility of…
Assuming that the dominant contribution, to the entropy due to entanglement across a spherical hypersurface, comes from the near horizon degrees of freedom, we analytically derive the entropy of a free massless scalar field in Minkowski…
It has recently been shown that the Einstein equation can be derived by demanding a non-equilibrium entropy balance law dS = dQ/T + dS_i hold for all local acceleration horizons through each point in spacetime. The entropy change dS is…
We estimate the transition rates of a uniformly accelerated Unruh-DeWitt detector coupled to a quantum field with reflecting conditions on a boundary plane (a "mirror"). We find that these are essentially indistinguishable from the usual…
The calculation of entanglement entropy S of quantum fields in spacetimes with horizon shows that, quite generically, S (a) is proportional to the area A of the horizon and (b) is divergent. I argue that this divergence, which arises even…
We compute the entropy of a Rindler particle-detector (observer) in the presence of a quantum field in the Minkowski vacuum state; due to the Unruh effect, the observer is immersed in a thermal bath at a temperature proportional to its…
We analyse the quantization procedure of the spinor field in the Rindler spacetime, showing the boundary conditions that should be imposed to the field, in order to have a well posed theory. We then investigate the relationship between this…
We investigate the sedimentation of identical inertialess spherical particles in a Stokes fluid in the limit of many small particles. It is known that the presence of the particles leads to an increase of the effective viscosity of the…
For an arbitrary quantum field in flat space with a planar boundary, an entropy of entanglement, associated with correlations across the boundary, is present when the field is in its vacuum state. The vacuum state of the same quantum field…
We discuss quantum entanglement between fast and slow degrees of freedom, in a two dimensional (2D) large $N_c$ gauge theory with Dirac quarks, quantized on the light front. Using the 't Hooft wave functions, we construct the reduced…
We review the quantization of scalar and gauge fields using Rindler coordinates with an emphasis on the physics of the Rindler horizon. In the thermal state at the Unruh temperature, correlators match their Minkowski vacuum values and the…
The viscosity of hadronic matter is studied using a classical evaluation of the scattering angle and a quantum mechanical discussion based on phase shifts from a potential. Semi classical limits of the quantum theory are presented. A hard…
We show that the generalized second law of thermodynamics may shed much light on the mysterious Kovtun-Son-Starinets (KSS) bound on the ratio of viscosity to entropy density. In particular, we obtain the lower bound $\eta/s…
We discuss the imaginary-time formalism for field theories in thermal equilibrium in uniformly accelerating frames. We show that under a Wick rotation of Minkowski spacetime, the Rindler event horizon shrinks to a point in a two-dimensional…
We investigate the behavior of the entanglement entropy of a confining gauge theory near cosmological singularities using gauge/gravity duality. As expected, the coefficients of the UV divergent terms are given by simple geometric…
Shear viscosity measures the amount of internal friction in a simple fluid. In kinetic theory shear viscosity is related to momentum transport by quasi-particles, and the uncertainty relation implies that the ratio of shear viscosity eta to…
We present a number of explicit calculations of Renyi and entanglement entropies in situations where the entangling surface intersects the boundary in $d$-dimensional Minkowski spacetime. When the boundary is a single plane we compute the…
The ratio of shear viscosity to volume density of entropy can be used to characterize how close a given fluid is to being perfect. Using string theory methods, we show that this ratio is equal to a universal value of $\hbar/4\pi k_B$ for a…