A Vaidya type geometry describing gravitation collapse in asymptotically Lifshitz spacetime with hyperscaling violation provides a simple holographic model for thermalization near a quantum critical point with non-trivial dynamic and hyperscaling violation exponents. The allowed parameter regions are constrained by requiring that the matter energy momentum tensor satisfies the null energy condition. We present a combination of analytic and numerical results on the time evolution of holographic entanglement entropy in such backgrounds for different shaped boundary regions and study various scaling regimes, generalizing previous work by Liu and Suh.
We employ the numerical and analytical methods to study the effects of the hyperscaling violation on the ground and excited states of holographic superconductors. For both the holographic s-wave and p-wave models with the hyperscaling violation, we observe that the excited state has a lower critical temperature than the corresponding ground state, which is similar to the relativistic case, and the difference of the dimensionless critical chemical potential between the consecutive states decreases as the hyperscaling violation increases. Interestingly, as we amplify the hyperscaling violation in the s-wave model, the critical temperature of the ground state first decreases and then increases, but that of the excited states always decreases. In the p-wave model, regardless of the the ground state or the excited states, the critical temperature always decreases with increasing the hyperscaling violation. In addition, we find that the hyperscaling violation affects the conductivity $sigma$ which has $2n+1$ poles in Im[$sigma$] and $2n$ poles in Re[$sigma$] for the $n$-th excited state, and changes the relation in the gap frequency for the excited states in both s-wave and p-wave models.
We study holographically Lifshitz-scaling theories with broken symmetries. In order to do this, we set up a bulk action with a complex scalar and a massless vector on a background which consists in a Lifshitz metric and a massive vector. We first study separately the complex scalar and the massless vector, finding a similar pattern in the two-point functions that we can compute analytically. By coupling the probe complex scalar to the background massive vector we can construct probe actions that are more general than the usual Klein--Gordon action. Some of these actions have Galilean boost symmetry. Finally, in the presence of a symmetry breaking scalar profile in the bulk, we reproduce the expected Ward identities of a Lifshitz-scaling theory with a broken global continuous symmetry. In the spontaneous case, the latter imply the presence of a gapless mode, the Goldstone boson, which will have dispersion relations dictated by the Lifshitz scaling.
We consider a holographic fermionic system in which the fermions are interacting with a U(1) gauge field in the presence of a dilaton field in a gravity bulk of a charged black hole with hyperscaling violation. Using both analytical and numerical methods, we investigate the properties of the infrared and ultaviolet Greens functions of the holographic fermionic system. Studying the spectral functions of the system, we find that as the hyperscaling violation exponent is varied, the fermionic system possesses Fermi, non-Fermi, marginal-Fermi and log-oscillating liquid phases. Various liquid phases of the fermionic system with hyperscaling violation are also generated with the variation of the fermionic mass. We also explore the properties of the flat band and the Fermi surface of the non-relativistic fermionic fixed point dual to the hyperscaling violation gravity.
We explore in greater detail our investigations of shear diffusion in hyperscaling violating Lifshitz theories in arXiv:1604.05092 [hep-th]. This adapts and generalizes the membrane-paradigm-like analysis of Kovtun, Son and Starinets for shear gravitational perturbations in the near horizon region given certain self-consistent approximations, leading to the shear diffusion constant on an appropriately defined stretched horizon. In theories containing a gauge field, some of the metric perturbations mix with some of the gauge field perturbations and the above analysis is somewhat more complicated. We find a similar near-horizon analysis can be obtained in terms of new field variables involving a linear combination of the metric and the gauge field perturbation resulting in a corresponding diffusion equation. Thereby as before, for theories with Lifshitz and hyperscaling violating exponents $z, theta$ satisfying $z<4-theta$ in four bulk dimensions, our analysis here results in a similar expression for the shear diffusion constant with power-law scaling with temperature suggesting universal behaviour in relation to the viscosity bound. For $z=4-theta$, we find logarithmic behaviour.
Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we probe the scale-dependence of thermalization in strongly coupled field theories following a quench, via calculations of two-point functions, Wilson loops and entanglement entropy in d=2,3,4. In the saddlepoint approximation these probes are computed in AdS space in terms of invariant geometric objects - geodesics, minimal surfaces and minimal volumes. Our calculations for two-dimensional field theories are analytical. In our strongly coupled setting, all probes in all dimensions share certain universal features in their thermalization: (1) a slight delay in the onset of thermalization, (2) an apparent non-analyticity at the endpoint of thermalization, (3) top-down thermalization where the UV thermalizes first. For homogeneous initial conditions the entanglement entropy thermalizes slowest, and sets a timescale for equilibration that saturates a causality bound over the range of scales studied. The growth rate of entanglement entropy density is nearly volume-independent for small volumes, but slows for larger volumes.