SciPost Submission Page
Higher-spin localized shocks
by Diandian Wang, Zi-Yue Wang
Submission summary
| Authors (as registered SciPost users): | Diandian Wang |
| Submission information | |
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| Preprint Link: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.19785v1 (pdf) |
| Date submitted: | March 20, 2025, 3:44 p.m. |
| Submitted by: | Wang, Diandian |
| Submitted to: | SciPost Physics |
| Ontological classification | |
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| Academic field: | Physics |
| Specialties: |
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| Approach: | Theoretical |
Abstract
In the context of AdS/CFT, gravitational shockwaves serve as a geometric manifestation of boundary quantum chaos. We study this connection in general diffeomorphism-invariant theories involving an arbitrary number of bosonic fields. Specifically, we demonstrate that theories containing spin-2 or higher-spin fields generally admit classical localized shockwave solutions on black hole backgrounds, whereas spin-0 and spin-1 theories do not. As in the gravitational case, these higher-spin shockwaves provide a means to compute the out-of-time-order correlator. Both the Lyapunov exponent and the butterfly velocity are found to universally agree with predictions from pole skipping. In particular, higher-spin fields lead to a Lyapunov exponent that violates the chaos bound and a butterfly velocity that may exceed the speed of light.
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