Dissipative hydrodynamic actions and horizon symmetries in gravity
Abstract
We give a prescription to compute a dissipative action describing the large-scale thermal stress tensor dynamics of a holographic quantum field theory dual to AdS4 gravity, in the context of the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. Our prescription is valid to quadratic order in perturbations about the thermal equilibrium state. The hydrodynamical degrees of freedom of this action are realised in gravity as relative diffeomorphisms between the black hole horizon and the two asymptotic boundaries of the Crossley-Glorioso-Liu contour. We explicitly compute the action to first order in derivatives, and confirm it correctly reproduces the known hydrodynamic Green's functions. Our prescription requires a choice of horizon boundary conditions for the metric. We study the horizon symmetries that preserve these, and their relation to conjectured hydrodynamic symmetries responsible for many-body quantum chaos.
Related
- Horizon symmetries of exact hydrodynamic actions
- Schwinger-Keldysh effective actions for non-hydrodynamic poles and branch cuts
- Novel hydrodynamic features in dissipative spin-polarized fluids
- The Stokes resistance of an arbitrary particle: a classification of hydrodynamic symmetries
- Dissipative Majorana Chain---Anomalies and Non-Invertible Symmetries
BibTeX
@misc{blake2026dissipative,
title = {{Dissipative hydrodynamic actions and horizon symmetries in gravity}},
author = {Mike Blake and Arpit Das and Richard A. Davison},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2607.00866},
eprint = {2607.00866},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00866},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Dissipative hydrodynamic actions and horizon symmetries in gravity
AU - Mike Blake
AU - Arpit Das
AU - Richard A. Davison
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2607.00866
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00866
AB - We give a prescription to compute a dissipative action describing the large-scale thermal stress tensor dynamics of a holographic quantum field theory dual to AdS_4 gravity, in the context of the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. Our prescription is valid to quadratic order in perturbations about the thermal equilibrium state. The hydrodynamical degrees of freedom of this action are realised in gravity as relative diffeomorphisms between the black hole horizon and the two asymptotic boundaries of the Crossley-Glorioso-Liu contour. We explicitly compute the action to first order in derivatives, and confirm it correctly reproduces the known hydrodynamic Green's functions. Our prescription requires a choice of horizon boundary conditions for the metric. We study the horizon symmetries that preserve these, and their relation to conjectured hydrodynamic symmetries responsible for many-body quantum chaos.
ER -