Holography and ARPES sum-rules

Umut Gursoy, Erik Plauschinn, Henk Stoof, Stefan Vandoren

Published 2011-12-21, updated 2012-04-18Version 3

We study correlation functions of elementary fermions in strongly interacting field theories using the AdS/CFT correspondence. This correspondence generically associates bulk fields to composite operators in field theory. We modify the holographic prescription in order to obtain correlators that correspond to fermonic single-particle excitations by introducing a dynamical fermionic source localized on a UV brane in a holographic background. We work out the conditions when these correlators obey the zeroth frequency sum-rule satisfied by angle-resolved photo-emission spectroscopy (ARPES) and are thus directly relevant to the AdS/CMT correspondence. To illustrate our techniques, we study field theories at zero chemical potential with an arbitrary dynamical exponent z, i.e., the Lifshitz invariant conformal field theories, including the usual relativistic case z=1.