Universal holographic hydrodynamics at finite coupling

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.

9 pages. v2: Comparison with lattice data added