Shear Transport Coefficients from Gauge/Gravity Correspondence

We study the shear mode in the gauge/gravity correspondence at finite temperature. First, we confirm the general formula for the shear viscosity in an arbitrary background metric which includes a black hole in the fifth dimension. We then derive a general formula for the shear mode relaxation time which appears in the theory of relativistic dissipative fluid dynamics; it agrees with known expressions in the limit of conformal fields. These results may be useful in relativistic viscous fluid descriptions of high energy nuclear collisions at RHIC and LHC.