Holographic Dissipation from the Symplectic Current

Abstract

We develop analytic techniques to construct the leading dissipative terms in a derivative expansion of holographic fluids. Our basic ingredient is the Crnkovic-Witten symplectic current of classical gravity which we use to extract the dissipative transport coefficients of holographic fluids, assuming knowledge of the thermodynamics and the near horizon geometries of the bulk black hole geometries. We apply our techniques to non-conformal neutral fluids to reproduce previous results on the shear viscosity and generalise a known expression for the bulk viscosity.