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arXiv · 2409.19785

Higher-spin localized shocks

Diandian Wang·Zi-Yue Wang
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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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Diandian Wang, Zi-Yue Wang. 2024-09-29. Higher-spin localized shocks. https://doi.org/10.1103/fpbn-pkyh

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