  An important transport coefficient in the study of non-Abelian plasmas is the
Chern-Simons diffusion rate, which parameterizes the rate of transition among
the degenerate vacua of a gauge theory. We compute this quantity at strong
coupling, via holography, using two theories of gravity with higher curvature
corrections, namely Gauss-Bonnet gravity and quasi-topological gravity. We find
that these corrections may either increase or decrease the result obtained from
Einstein's gravity, depending on the value of the couplings. The Chern-Simons
diffusion rate for Gauss-Bonnet gravity decreases as the shear viscosity over
entropy ratio is increased.
