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arXiv · 2511.03633

Scrambling or Stalling: Angular Momentum Barriers to Chaos in Holographic CFTs

Juan Hernandez·Andrew Rolph
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Abstract

Scrambling is a diagnostic of quantum chaos in strongly coupled systems, and plays a central role in the holographic description of black hole dynamics. We study scrambling in high-temperature holographic CFTs, with an emphasis on perturbations dual to particles on infalling and bound trajectories in the bulk description. For BTZ and AdS-Schwarzschild geometries, we derive an analytic expression relating the difference in scrambling times to the particles' kinematics. We match this to a 2d CFT computation by constructing the smeared operator that creates the bulk particle with the desired kinematics and calculating the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC). For higher-dimensional holographic CFTs, the scrambling slows and eventually ceases when the dual bulk particle has insufficient energy to overcome the angular momentum barrier.

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Juan Hernandez, Andrew Rolph. 2025-11-05. Scrambling or Stalling: Angular Momentum Barriers to Chaos in Holographic CFTs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03633

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