Viscosity in strongly interacting quantum field theories from black hole physics.

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

The ratio of shear viscosity to volume density of entropy can be used to characterize how close a given fluid is to being perfect. Using string theory methods, we show that this ratio is equal to a universal value of variant Planck's over 2pi/4pik(B) for a large class of strongly interacting quantum field theories whose dual description involves black holes in anti-de Sitter space. We provide evidence that this value may serve as a lower bound for a wide class of systems, thus suggesting that black hole horizons are dual to the most ideal fluids.