Abstract

I will discuss what we have learned in the past year about transport in strongly interacting metallic phases by studying the linear response of planar black holes with broken translational symmetry. Firstly, I will discuss how holography tells us that the conductivity of weakly disordered metals is described by the Drude formula, confirming a “prediction” of the many-body memory matrix approach. Secondly, I will discuss the derivation of non-perturbative conductivity bounds, invoking a new version of the holographic membrane paradigm. These bounds rule out disorder-driven phase transitions (which would generically exist in traditional condensed matter models) in the boundary theory under rather mild assumptions about the existence and nature of solutions to Einstein’s equations. Connections between these black-hole inspired theories of transport and novel experiments in graphene will also be discussed.