Striped instability of a holographic Fermi-like liquid

• DOI: 10.1007/jhep10(2011)034
• Publication Date: 2011-10-14T02:58:32Z
• Authors: Oren Bergman; Niko Jokela; Gilad Lifschytz; Matthew Lippert
• Keywords: High Energy Physics - Theory; Condensed Matter - Strongly Correlated Electrons; High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th); Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); 0103 physical sciences; FOS: Physical sciences; 01 natural sciences

16 pages, 9 figures; v2: added discussion and one figure. Typos corrected<br/>We consider a holographic description of a system of strongly-coupled fermions in 2+1 dimensions based on a D7-brane probe in the background of D3-branes. The black hole embedding represents a Fermi-like liquid. We study the excitations of the Fermi liquid system. Above a critical density which depends on the temperature, the system becomes unstable towards an inhomogeneous modulated phase which is similar to a charge density and spin wave state. The essence of this instability can be effectively described by a Maxwell-axion theory with a background electric field. We also consider the fate of zero sound at non-zero temperature.<br/>