Breaking rotations without violating the KSS viscosity bound

We revisit the computation of the shear viscosity to entropy ratio in a holographic p-wave superfluid model, focusing on the role of rotational symmetry breaking. We study the interplay between explicit and spontaneous symmetry breaking and derive a simple horizon formula for & eta;/s, which is valid also in the presence of explicit breaking of rotations and is in perfect agreement with the numerical data. We observe that a source which explicitly breaks rotational invariance suppresses the value of & eta;/s in the broken phase, competing against the effects of spontaneous symmetry breaking. However, & eta;/s always reaches a constant value in the limit of zero temperature, which is never smaller than the Kovtun-Son-Starinets (KSS) bound, 1/4 & pi;. This behavior appears to be in contrast with previous holographic anisotropic models which found a power-law vanishing of & eta;/s at small temperature. This difference is shown to arise from the properties of the near-horizon geometry in the extremal limit. Thus, our construction shows that the breaking of rotations itself does not necessarily imply a violation of the KSS bound.

Automated summary

We investigate the impact of rotational symmetry breaking on the computation of the shear viscosity to entropy ratio in a holographic p-wave superfluid model. By studying the interplay between explicit and spontaneous symmetry breaking, we derive a horizon formula for η/s that is applicable even in the presence of rotational breaking and agrees well with numerical data. Despite the competition between explicit and spontaneous symmetry breaking, η/s always reaches a constant value at zero temperature, which is above the Kovtun-Son-Starinets (KSS) bound. This contrasts with previous holographic anisotropic models exhibiting a power-law vanishing of η/s at small temperatures due to different near-horizon geometry properties in the extremal limit.