Out of Equilibrium Temperature from Holography

Abstract

We define an effective temperature and study its properties for a class of out-of-equilibrium steady states in a heat bath. Our analysis is based on the anti-de Sitter spacetime/conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence, and examples include systems driven by applied electric fields and branes dragged in plasmas. We found that the effective temperature can be lower than that of the heat bath and that the out-of-equilibrium noise can be smaller than that in equilibrium. We show that a generalization of the fluctuation-dissipation relation holds for the effective temperature. In particular, we generalize the Johnson-Nyquist relation for large electric field.