Quasinormal Modes of Near-Extremal Electric and Magnetic Black Branes

Abstract

Gauge-gravity duality provides a robust mathematical framework for studying the behavior of strongly coupled non-abelian plasmas both near and far away from thermodynamic equilibrium. In particular, their near-equilibrium transport coefficients such as viscosity, conductivity, diffusion constants, etc. can be determined from poles of the retarded Green's function which are the dissipative eigenmodes i.e., the quasinormal modes (QNMs) of the dual gravitational field equations. The AdS5/CFT4 correspondence admits the description of a strongly coupled $\mathcal{N}$= 4 Supersymmetric Yang Mills (SYM) plasma at non-zero temperature as a dual AdS5 black brane geometry. We demonstrate the application of pseudospectral methods to solving the dual Einstein field equations using the example of homogenous isotropization in $\mathcal{N}$= 4 SYM plasma far from equilibrium. Using this framework, we also compute the quasinormal modes of electrically (Reissner-Nordstrom) and magnetically charged AdS5 black branes for the case of vanishing spatial momenta. The near-extremal behavior of these QNMs is analyzed for both types of black branes.