English

Gapless and gapped holographic phonons

High Energy Physics - Theory 2020-01-29 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We study a holographic model where translations are both spontaneously and explicitly broken, leading to the presence of (pseudo)-phonons in the spectrum. The weak explicit breaking is due to two independent mechanisms: a small source for the condensate itself and additional linearly space-dependent marginal operators. The low energy dynamics of the model is described by Wigner crystal hydrodynamics. In absence of a source for the condensate, the phonons remain gapless, but momentum is relaxed. Turning on a source for the condensate damps and pins the phonons. Finally, we verify that the universal relation between the phonon damping rate, mass and diffusivity reported in arXiv:1812.08118 continues to hold in this model for weak enough explicit breaking.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.11330,
  title  = {Gapless and gapped holographic phonons},
  author = {Andrea Amoretti and Daniel Areán and Blaise Goutéraux and Daniele Musso},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.11330},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

v1: 24 pages, 10 figures. v2: minor edits, version accepted in jhep

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:54:08.215Z