Inflow Mechanism for Hydrodynamic Entropy.

We argue that entropy production in hydrodynamics can be understood via a superspace inflow mechanism. Our arguments are based on a recently developed formalism for constructing effective actions for Schwinger-Keldysh observables in quantum field theories. The formalism explicitly incorporates microscopic unitarity and the Kubo-Martin-Schwinger thermal periodicity conditions, by recasting them in terms of topological Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin symmetries of the effective action.

Higher Curvature Gravity from Entanglement in Conformal Field Theories.

By generalizing different recent works to the context of higher curvature gravity, we provide a unifying framework for three related results: (i) If an asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime computes the entanglement entropies of ball-shaped regions in a conformal field theory using a generalized Ryu-Takayanagi formula up to second order in state deformations around the vacuum, then the spacetime satisfies the correct gravitational equations of motion up to second order around the AdS background. (ii) The holographic dual of entanglement entropy in higher curvature theories of gravity is given by the Wald entropy plus a particular correction term involving extrinsic curvatures. (iii) Conformal field theory relative entropy is dual to gravitational canonical energy (also in higher curvature theories of gravity). Especially for the second point, our novel derivation of this previously known statement does not involve the Euclidean replica trick.

Fine Grained Chaos in AdS_{2} Gravity.

Quantum chaos can be characterized by an exponential growth of the thermal out-of-time-order four-point function up to a scrambling time u[over ^]_{*}. We discuss generalizations of this statement for certain higher-point correlation functions. For concreteness, we study the Schwarzian theory of a one-dimensional time reparametrization mode, which describes two-dimensional anti-de Sitter space (AdS_{2}) gravity and the low-energy dynamics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. We identify a particular set of 2k-point functions, characterized as being both "maximally braided" and "k-out of time order," which exhibit exponential growth until progressively longer time scales u[over ^]_{*}^{(k)}∼(k-1)u[over ^]_{*}. We suggest an interpretation as scrambling of increasingly fine grained measures of quantum information, which correspondingly take progressively longer time to reach their thermal values.

Eightfold Classification of Hydrodynamic Dissipation.

We provide a complete characterization of hydrodynamic transport consistent with the second law of thermodynamics at arbitrary orders in the gradient expansion. A key ingredient in facilitating this analysis is the notion of adiabatic hydrodynamics, which enables isolation of the genuinely dissipative parts of transport. We demonstrate that most transport is adiabatic. Furthermore, in the dissipative part, only terms at the leading order in gradient expansion are constrained to be sign definite by the second law (as has been derived before).