Diagonal and Hall holographic conductivities dual to a bulk condensate of magnetic monopoles

Abstract

By employing the holographic operator mixing technique to deal with coupled perturbations in the gauge/gravity duality, I numerically compute the real and imaginary parts of the diagonal and Hall AC conductivities in a strongly coupled quantum field theory dual to a bulk condensate of magnetic monopoles. The results obtained show that a conclusion previously derived in the literature, namely, the vanishing of holographic DC conductivities in 3-dimensional strongly coupled quantum field theories dual to a 4-dimensional bulk magnetic monopole condensate, also applies to the calculation of diagonal and Hall conductivities in the presence of a topological theta -term. Therefore, the condensation of magnetic monopoles in the bulk is suggested as a rather general and robust mechanism to generate dual strongly coupled quantum field theories with zero DC conductivities. The interplay between frequency, theta -angle and the characteristic mass scale of the monopole condensate on the results for the conductivities is also investigated.