Universal holographic hydrodynamics at finite coupling

TL;DR

The paper addresses whether finite coupling corrections to hydrodynamic properties are universal across a broad class of holographic conformal plasmas with AdS5xM5 duals. The authors develop a five-dimensional universal effective action by reducing the ten-dimensional type IIb theory with the alpha'^3 R^4 correction on any Sasaki-Einstein M5 and show that the equations of motion—and hence thermodynamic and hydrodynamic properties—do not depend on the details of M5. They demonstrate that Schouten identities remove the potentially M5-dependent terms, establishing universality for the eta/s corrections and more generally for transport coefficients, with explicit mappings to dual gauge theory data including quiver theories and KW-like cases. They discuss limitations (such as a=c and nonzero chemical potential) and highlight the potential relevance of these universal holographic results for interpreting QCD-like plasmas and comparing with lattice data.

Abstract

We consider thermal plasmas in a large class of superconformal gauge theories described by a holographic dual geometry of the form $AdS_5\times M_5$. In particular, we demonstrate that all of the thermodynamic properties and hydrodynamic transport parameters for a large class of superconformal gauge theories exhibit a certain universality to leading order in the inverse 't Hooft coupling and $1/N_c$. In particular, we show that independent of the compactification geometry, the leading corrections are derived from the same five-dimensional effective supergravity action supplemented by a term quartic in the five-dimensional Weyl tensor.