Motivated by the vast string landscape, we consider the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio in conformal field theories dual to Einstein gravity with curvature square corrections. After field redefinitions these theories reduce to Gauss-Bonnet g
ravity, which has special properties that allow us to compute the shear viscosity nonperturbatively in the Gauss-Bonnet coupling. By tuning of the coupling, the value of the shear viscosity to entropy density ratio can be adjusted to any positive value from infinity down to zero, thus violating the conjectured viscosity bound. At linear order in the coupling, we also check consistency of four different methods to calculate the shear viscosity, and we find that all of them agree. We search for possible pathologies associated with this class of theories violating the viscosity bound.
We construct a holographic SU(2) p-wave superconductor model with Weyl corrections. The high derivative (HD) terms do not seem to spoil the generation of the p-wave superconducting phase. We mainly study the properties of AC conductivity, which is ab
sent in holographic SU(2) p-wave superconductor with Weyl corrections. The conductivities in superconducting phase exhibit obvious anisotropic behaviors. Along $y$ direction, the conductivity $sigma_{yy}$ is similar to that of holographic s-wave superconductor. The superconducting energy gap exhibits a wide extension. For the conductivity $sigma_{xx}$ along $x$ direction, the behaviors of the real part in the normal state are closely similar to that of $sigma_{yy}$. However, the anisotropy of the conductivity obviously shows up in the superconducting phase. A Drude-like peak at low frequency emerges in $Resigma_{xx}$ once the system enters into the superconducting phase, regardless of the behaviors in normal state.
Recently there has been a growing interest in quantum gravity theories with more than four derivatives, including both their quantum and classical aspects. In this work we extend the recent results concerning the non-singularity of the modified Newto
nian potential to the most relevant case in which the propagator has complex poles. The model we consider is Einstein-Hilbert action augmented by curvature-squared higher-derivative terms which contain polynomials on the dAlembert operator. We show that the classical potential of these theories is a real quantity and it is regular at the origin disregard the (complex or real) nature or the multiplicity of the massive poles. The expression for the potential is explicitly derived for some interesting particular cases. Finally, the issue of the mechanism behind the cancellation of the singularity is discussed; specifically we argue that the regularity of the potential can hold even if the number of massive tensor modes and scalar ones is not the same.
We compute the one-loop divergences in a higher-derivative theory of gravity including Ricci tensor squared and Ricci scalar squared terms, in addition to the Hilbert and cosmological terms, on an (generally off-shell) Einstein background. We work wi
th a two-parameter family of parametrizations of the graviton field, and a two-parameter family of gauges. We find that there are some choices of gauge or parametrization that reduce the dependence on the remaining parameters. The results are invariant under a recently discovered duality that involves the replacement of the densitized metric by a densitized inverse metric as the fundamental quantum variable.
In general coordinate invariant gravity theories whose Lagrangians contain arbitrarily high order derivative fields, the Noether currents for the global translation and for the Nakanishis IOSp(8|8) choral symmetry containing the BRS symmetry as its m
ember, are constructed. We generally show that for each of those Noether currents a suitable linear combination of equations of motion can be brought into the form of Maxwell-type field equation possessing the Noether current as its source term.