Ohm's Law at strong coupling: S duality and the cyclotron resonance

Abstract

We calculate the electrical and thermal conductivities and the thermoelectric coefficient of a class of strongly interacting 2+1 dimensional conformal field theories with anti-de Sitter space duals. We obtain these transport coefficients as a function of charge density, background magnetic field, temperature and frequency. We show that the thermal conductivity and thermoelectric coefficient are determined by the electrical conductivity alone. At small frequency, in the hydrodynamic limit, we are able to provide a number of analytic formulae for the electrical conductivity. A dominant feature of the conductivity is the presence of a cyclotron pole. We show how bulk electromagnetic duality acts on the transport coefficients.