We calculate the shear viscosity of strongly coupled field theories dual to Gauss-Bonnet gravity at zero temperature with nonzero chemical potential. We find that the ratio of the shear viscosity over the entropy density is $1/4pi$, which is in accor
dance with the zero temperature limit of the ratio at nonzero temperatures. We also calculate the DC conductivity for this system at zero temperature and find that the real part of the DC conductivity vanishes up to a delta function, which is similar to the result in Einstein gravity. We show that at zero temperature, we can still have the conclusion that the shear viscosity is fully determined by the effective coupling of transverse gravitons in a kind of theories that the effective action of transverse gravitons can be written into a form of minimally coupled scalars with a deformed effective coupling.
We consider a higher derivative gravity theory in four dimensions with a negative cosmological constant and show that vacuum solutions of both Lifshitz type and Schr{o}dinger type with arbitrary dynamical exponent z exist in this system. Then we find
an analytic black hole solution which asymptotes to the vacuum Lifshitz solution with z=3/2 at a specific value of the coupling constant. We analyze the thermodynamic behavior of this black hole and find that the black hole has zero entropy while non-zero temperature, which is very similar to the case of BTZ black holes in new massive gravity at a specific coupling. In addition, we find that the three dimensional Lifshitz black hole recently found by E. Ayon-Beato et al. has a negative entropy and mass when the Newton constant is taken to be positive.
We show that the confinement-deconfinement phase transition of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories with 16 supercharges in various dimensions can be realized through the Hawking-Page phase transition between the near horizon geometries of black Dp-bra
nes and BPS Dp-branes by removing a small radius region in the geometry in order to realize a confinement phase, which generalizes the Herzogs discussion for the holographic hard-wall AdS/QCD model. Removing a small radius region in the gravitational dual corresponds to introducing an IR cutoff in the dual field theory. We also discuss the Hawking-Page phase transition between thermal $AdS_5$, $AdS_4$, $AdS_7$ spaces and R-charged AdS black holes coming from the spherical reduction of the decoupling limit of rotating D3-, M2-, and M5- branes in type IIB supergravity and 11 dimensional supergravity in grand canonical ensembles, where the IR cutoff also plays a crucial role in the existence of the phase transition.
