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Pole skipping, quasinormal modes, shockwaves and their connection to chaos
September 12, 2023 @ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
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.