Universal spatial structure of nonequilibrium steady states

Understand

We describe a large family of nonequilibrium steady states (NESS) corresponding to forced flows over obstacles.

• The spatial structure at large distances from the obstacle is shown to be universal, and can be quantitatively characterised in terms of certain collective modes of the strongly coupled many body system, which we define in this work.
• In holography, these modes are spatial analogues of quasinormal modes, which are known to be responsible for universal aspects of relaxation of time dependent systems.
• These modes can be both hydrodynamical or non-hydrodynamical in origin.