Pole skipping, quasinormal modes, shockwaves and their connection to chaos

09/12/2023 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Daniel Kapek Jue Liu Puskar Mondal
CMSA, 20 Garden St, G10
Website:https://cmsa.fas.harvard.edu
Address: 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

General Relativity Seminar

Speaker: Diandian Wang(Harvard University)

Title: Pole skipping, quasinormal modes, shockwaves and their connection to chaos

Abstract: A chaotic quantum system can be studied using the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC). I will tell you about pole skipping — a recently discovered feature of the retarded Green’s function — that seems to also know things: things like the Lyapunov exponent and the butterfly velocity, which are important quantifiers of the OTOC. Then I will talk about a systematic way of deriving pole-skipping conditions for general holographic CFTs dual to classical bulk theories and how to use this framework to derive a few interesting statements including: (1) theories with higher spins generally violate the chaos bound; (2) the butterfly velocity calculated using pole skipping agrees with that calculated using shockwaves for arbitrary higher-derivative gravity coupled to ordinary matter; (3) shockwaves are related to a special type of quasinormal modes. As we will see, the techniques are entirely classically gravitational, which I will go through with a certain level of details.