| In this dissertation, we present examples of using holography to study systems of interest in condensed matter. The examples we study are not necessarily consistent truncations of string theory or M-theory, but we motivate the work as being phenomenological; we use the minimum elements needed to capture the physics of interest. We study the following two distinct phenomena: superconductivity and Fermi liquids. We show that in the presence of a magnetic field, the holographic superconductor setup has droplet solutions and vortex solutions, allowing us to postulate a phase diagram for our superconductor as a function of magnetic field and temperature. In the presence of a magnetic field, the holographic Fermi liquid has two distinct quasiparticle excitations that couple differently to the magnetic field. We show that these excitations scale differently with magnetic field than expected for either relativistic or non--relativistic Landau levels. Furthermore, we justify the shift of the Fermi energy away from the chemical potential by performing an analytical calculation in a background with similar properties. |
