Quasinormal modes and the phase structure of strongly coupled matter

Romuald A. Janik, Jakub Jankowski, Hesam Soltanpanahi

Published 2016-03-18Version 1

We investigate the poles of the retarded Green's functions of strongly coupled field theories exhibiting a variety of phase structures from a crossover up to different first order phase transitions. These theories are modeled by a dual gravitational description. The poles of the holographic Green's functions appear at the frequencies of the quasinormal modes of the dual black hole background. We focus on quantifying linearized level dynamical response of the system in the critical region of phase diagram. Generically non-hydrodynamic degrees of freedom dominate the low energy physics, and in some cases degeneracy of hydrodynamic and non-hydrodynamic modes is found.