Lorentz violation, gravity, dissipation and holography

Abstract

We reconsider Lorentz Violation (LV) at the fundamental level. We argue that Lorentz Violation is intimately connected with gravity and that LV couplings in QFT must always be fields in a gravitational sector. Diffeomorphism covariance, implementing general charnges of frame, is intact and the LV couplings transform as tensors under coordinate/frame changes. Therefore searching for LV is one of the most sensitive ways of looking for new physics, either new interactions or modifications of known ones. Energy dissipation/Cerenkov radiation is shown to be a generic feature of LV in QFT. A general computation is done in strongly coupled theories with gravity duals. It is shown that in scale invariant regimes, the energy dissipation rate depends non-trivially on two characteristic exponents, the Lifshitz exponent and the hyperscaling violation exponent. © 2013 SISSA.