Non-equilibrium dynamics and phase transitions

Understand

We study the poles of the retarded Green's functions of strongly coupled field theories exhibiting a variety of phase structures from a crossover up to a first order phase transition.

• 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 establish that near the transition, in all cases considered, the applicability of a hydrodynamic description breaks down already at lower momenta than in the conformal case.