The shear viscosity of holographic superfluids

We study the ratio of the shear viscosity to the entropy density for various holographic superfluids. For the s-wave case, the ratio has the universal value 1/(4pi) as in various holographic models. For the p-wave case, there are two shear viscosity coefficients because of the anisotropic boundary spacetime, and one coefficient has the universal value. For the (p+ip)-wave case, the existing technique is not applicable since there is no tensor mode of metric perturbations which decouples from Yang-Mills perturbations. Our results indicate that the shear viscosity does not show a singular behavior at the critical point for holographic superfluids.Comment: 22 pages, PTPTe

Causal hydrodynamics and the membrane paradigm

We obtain the relaxation time for the shear viscous stress for various geometries using the "membrane paradigm" formula proposed recently. We consider the generic Schwarzschild-AdS black holes (SAdS), the generic Dp-brane, the Klebanov-Tseytlin (KT) geometry, and the N=2* theory. The formula is the "shear mode" result and is not fully trustable, but it may be helpful to learn some generic behaviors about the relaxation time. For example, a simple formula summarizes all known results for SAdS, and a single expression summarizes the results for the Dp-brane and the KT geometry.Comment: 8 pages, ReVTeX