Holographic dual of cold trapped fermions

Abstract

We study cold fermionic atoms using the holographic principle. We note that current atomic experiments with massive fermions trapped in a harmonic potential in the unitarity limit behave as massless fermions thanks to the Thomas-Fermi approximation. We map the thermodynamics of strongly correlated massless fermion to that of the charged black hole and study the thermodynamics and transport properties of cold fermions at strong coupling at finite temperature and density. In cold limit, the specific heat of charged black hole is linear in T independent of the dimensionality, which is reminiscent of Fermi liquids. The shear viscosity per particle is shown to be finite as a consequence of the non-vanishing of the entropy. We show that our holographic results compare favorably with most of the current atomic data. © 2009 SISSA.