Breakdown of hydrodynamics from holographic pole collision

Abstract We study the breakdown of diffusive hydrodynamics in holographic systems dual to neutral dilatonic black holes with extremal near horizon geometries conformal to AdS2 × R2. We find that at low temperatures by tuning the effective gauge coupling constant in the infra-red, the lowest non-hydrodynamic mode, which collides with the charge diffusive mode and sets the scales at which diffusive hydrodynamics breaks down, could be either an infra-red mode or a slow mode, resulting in different scaling behaviors of the local equilibrium scales. We confirm that the upper bound for the charge diffusion constant is always satisfied using the velocity and timescale of local equilibration from the pole collision. We also examine the breakdown of hydrodynamics at general temperature and find that the convergence radius has nontrivial dependence on temperature, in addition to the effective gauge coupling constant.