arXiv subjects

Mihailo Čubrović

Publications and source records attributed to Mihailo Čubrović.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Random wave chaos on momentum-fractionated microstate geometries

We study the role of momentum fractionation in the development of chaos on smooth 3-charge supergravity solutions of D1-D5 theory, specifically momentum-fractionated superstrata. We probe the chaos through the dynamics of null geodesics and waves. On fractionated backgrounds, both geodesics and waves show uniformly strong chaos (large chaotic sea and near-perfect agreement with the Berry random wave hypothesis). In contrast, geodesics and waves on single-mode (non-fractionated) superstrata are closer to separability (although still chaotic). We discuss a possibility that such dichotomy can be related to the expectation that monotone BPS states are less chaotic than fortuitous ones. Finally, we explain why our chaos probes are meaningful for microstate geometries even though they become trivial in the black hole limit.

hep-th↗

arXiv2026

Berry Picking: Random Wave Chaos Hierarchy for BPS Microstate Geometries

We estimate the strength of chaos of probe waves and probe geodesics in different smooth supergravity backgrounds of decreasing supersymmetry and/or increasing length of the AdS throat in the interior. Since BPS spectra are highly degenerate and thus do not display the level repulsion that ordinarily diagnoses chaos, we propose compliance with the Berry random wave hypothesis for probe wavefunctions as a new notion of BPS chaos suited to the supergravity regime. The wave chaos becomes stronger and stronger with less supersymmetry and longer throats (i.e., as we approach black hole solutions). Geodesic motion shows the opposite trend, becoming more and more regular. We explain this dichotomy by the existence of stable periodic orbits inside long throats while the overall measure of KAM tori decreases. Computing the Rényi entropies for the dual CFT states in the weak coupling regime, we show that they do not have such universal behavior.

hep-th↗

arXiv2025

Trapping, chaos and averaging in bubbling AdS spaces

We discuss chaos and ensemble averaging in 1/2 BPS bubbling $AdS$ spaces of Lin, Lunin and Maldacena (LLM) by studying trapped and escaping null geodesics and estimating their decay rates. We find typical chaotic scattering behavior and confirm the Pesin relation between escape rates, Lyapunov exponents and Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy. On the other hand, for geodesics in coarse-grained (grayscale) LLM geometries (which exhibit a naked singularity) chaos is strongly suppressed, which is consistent with orbits and escape rates averaged over microscopic backgrounds. Also the singularities in these grayscale geometries produce an attractive potential and have some similarities to black hole throats trapping geodesics for a long time. Overall, averaging over the ensembles of LLM geometries brings us closer toward the typical behavior of geodesics in black hole backgrounds, but some important differences remain, in particular the existence of a threshold timescale when the averaging fails.

hep-th↗

arXiv2025

Diffusion and instabilities in large-N holographic Fermi liquids: the vector fluctuations of the electron star

We study the hydrodynamic response of the AdS electron star in the vector sector, and compute the correlation functions and the transverse conductivity of the dual field theory. The system exhibits hydrodynamic behavior at low temperatures and near the critical temperature where the electron star undergoes the phase transition to the RN black hole. However, at intermediate temperatures the hydrodynamics does not exist. Remarkably, the system has an instability, i.e. a pole on the positive imaginary frequency axis at finite temperature. This instability is found both from analytical arguments and from numerics. Its physical meaning is so far unclear but it might mean that the ideal fluid limit for the star is a false vacuum.

hep-th↗

arXiv2025

Superdiffusion, normal diffusion and chaos in semiclassical Bose-Hubbard chains

We study the evolution of two-point correlation functions of one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model in the semiclassical regime in the framework of Truncated Wigner Approximation (TWA) with quantum jumps as first-order corrections. At early times, the correlation functions show strong superdiffusion with universal integer exponents determined solely by the initial conditions and completely insensitive to system parameters and chaos. Only after a long time this regime crosses over to normal diffusion regime which is most robust when nonintegrability is strong. For strong nonintegrability, the system ends up in a homogeneous state while for weak nonintegrability the oscillations and inhomogeneities persist, despite the fact that chaos is nearly always strong and only weakly depends on nonintegrability parameter. We conclude that the superidiffusive regime is neither prethermalized nor a precursor to thermalization but a novel early-time phenomenon related to a special scaling symmetry of the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Thermodynamic formalism and anomalous transport in 1D semiclassical Bose-Hubbard chain

We analyze the time-dependent free energy functionals of the semiclassical one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard chain. We first review the weakly chaotic dynamics and the consequent early-time anomalous diffusion in the system. The anomalous diffusion is robust, appears with strictly quantized coefficients, and persists even for very long chains (more than hundred sites), crossing over to normal diffusion at late times. We identify fast (angle) and slow (action) variables and thus consider annealed and quenched partition functions, corresponding to fixing the actions and integrating over the actions, respectively. We observe the leading quantum effects in the annealed free energy, whereas the quenched energy is undefined in the thermodynamic limit, signaling the absence of thermodynamic equilibrium in the quenched regime. But already the leading correction away from the quenched regime reproduces the annealed partition function exactly. This encapsulates the fact that in both slow- and fast-chaos regime both the anomalous and the normal diffusion can be seen (though at different times).

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Correlation functions for open strings and chaos

We study the holographic interpretation of the bulk instability, i.e. the bulk Lyapunov exponent in the motion of open classical bosonic strings in AdS black hole/brane/string backgrounds. In the vicinity of homogeneous and isotropic horizons the bulk Lyapunov exponent saturates the MSS chaos bound but in fact has nothing to do with chaos as our string configurations live in an integrable sector. In the D1-D5-p black string background, the bulk Lyapunov exponent is deformed away from the MSS value both by the rotation (the infrared deformation) and the existence of an asymptotically flat region (the ultraviolet deformation). The dynamics is still integrable and has nothing to do with chaos (either in gravity or in field theory). Instead, the bulk Lyapunov scale captures the imaginary part of quasinormal mode frequencies. Therefore, the meaning of the bulk chaos is that it determines the thermal decay rate due to the coupling to the heat bath, i.e. the horizon.

hep-th↗

arXiv2024

Weak chaos and mixed dynamics in the string S-matrix

We investigate chaotic dynamics in tree-level S-matrices describing the scattering of tachyons, photons and gravitons on highly excited open and closed bosonic strings, motivated by the string/black hole complementarity. The eigenphase spacing distribution and other indicators of quantum chaotic scattering suggest that the dynamics is only weakly chaotic, consisting of both regular/Poisson and chaotic/Wigner-Dyson processes. Only for special values of momenta and (for photon scattering) scattering angles do we find strong chaos of random matrix type. These special values correspond to a crossover between two regimes of scattering, dominated by short versus long partitions of the total occupation number of the highly excited string; they also maximize the information entropy of the S-matrix. The lack of strong chaos suggests that perturbative dynamics of highly excited strings can never describe the universal properties and maximal chaos of black hole horizons.

hep-th↗

arXiv2024

Chaos and anomalous transport in a semiclassical Bose-Hubbard chain

We study chaotic dynamics and anomalous transport in a Bose-Hubbard chain in the semiclassical regime (the limit when the number of particles goes to infinity). We find that the system has mixed phase space with both regular and chaotic dynamics, even for long chains with up to hundred wells. The consequence of the mixed phase space is strongly anomalous diffusion in the space of occupation numbers, with a discrete set of transport exponents. After very long times the system crosses over to the hydrodynamic regime with normal diffusion. Anomalous transport is quite universal, almost completely independent of the parameters of the model (Coulomb interaction, chemical potential): it is mainly determined by the initial distribution of particles along the chain. We corroborate our findings by analytical arguments: scaling analysis for the anomalous regime and the Langevin equation for the normal diffusion regime.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Wormholes and out-of-time ordered correlators in gauge/gravity duality

We calculate the four-wave scattering amplitude in the background of an AdS traversable wormhole in 2+1 dimensions created by a nonlocal coupling of AdS boundaries in the BTZ black hole background. The holographic dual of this setup is a pair of CFTs coupled via a double-trace deformation, the scattering amplitude giving the out-of-time ordered correlator (OTOC) in CFT. Short-living wormholes always exhibit a regime of fast scrambling, saturating the MSS bound for the Lyapunov exponent but in the early-time regime the scrambling can be slower, with a Lyapunov exponent linear in $T$ but below the MSS bound. For long-living (near-eternal) wormholes however the numerics suggests the existence of another regime, with a drastic (exponential) slowdown of scrambling and an exponentially small Lyapunov exponent. Our findings have parallels in the SYK model, and may indicate certain limitations of wormhole teleportation protocols previously studied in the literature.

hep-th↗

arXiv2023

Photoemission "experiments" on holographic lattices

We construct a 2D holographic ionic lattice with hyperscaling-violating infrared geometry and study single-electron spectral functions ("ARPES photoemission curves") on this background. The spectra typically show a three-peak structure, where the central peak undergoes a crossover from a sharp but not Fermi-liquid-like quasiparticle to a wide incoherent maximum, and the broad side peaks resemble the Hubbard bands. These findings are partially explained by a perturbative near-horizon analysis of the bulk Dirac equation. Comparing the holographic Green functions in imaginary frequency with the Green functions of the Hubbard model obtained from quantum Monte Carlo, we find that the holographic model provides a very good fit to the Hubbard Green function. However, the information loss when transposing the holographic Green functions to imaginary frequencies implies that a deeper connection to Hubbard-like models remains questionable.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2022

Emerging Fermi liquids from regulated Quantum Electron Stars

We construct a fully quantum zero-temperature electron star in a soft-wall regulated anti-de-Sitter Einstein-Maxwell-Dirac theory that is thermodynamically stable compared to the Reissner-Nordström black hole. The soft wall only acts on the effective mass of the fermionic degrees of freedom, and allows for a controlled fully backreacted solution. The star is holographically dual to an RG flow where a gapped Fermi liquid starts to emerge from a UV CFT, but decouples again once the effective energy scale becomes lower than the the gap of the fermionic degrees of freedom. The RG flow then returns to a non-trivial strongly coupled relativistic fixed point with a holographic dual. Our regulated quantum electron star is thus the fermionic analogue of the Horowitz-Roberts-Gubser-Rocha AdS-to-AdS domain wall solution for the holographic superconductor.

hep-th↗

arXiv2022

Replicas, averaging and factorization in the IIB matrix model

We study the partition functions of multiple replicas (copies) of D-brane configurations in the type IIB (IKKT) matrix model. We consider the quenched regime, where small fluctuations of the matrices are superimposed onto the slow (quenched) dynamics of the background, so the partition function is an ensemble average over the background. Interacting D-branes always factorize in a simple way. On the other hand, the non-interacting BPS configurations may or may not factorize depending on the number of replicas, and their factorization mechanism is more involved as the corresponding saddle-point solutions (half-wormholes) break the replica symmetry. We argue that the simple factorization mechanism of interacting branes is actually more interesting as it carries the specific signatures of quantum gravity, which are absent from disordered field theories like the SYK model.

hep-th↗

arXiv2022

Detecting few-body quantum chaos: out-of-time ordered correlators at saturation

We study numerically and analytically the time dependence and saturation of out-of-time ordered correlators (OTOC) in chaotic few-body quantum-mechanical systems: quantum Henon-Heiles system (weakly chaotic), BMN matrix quantum mechanics (strongly chaotic) and Gaussian random matrix ensembles. The growth pattern of quantum-mechanical OTOC is complex and nonuniversal, with no clear exponential regime at relevant timescales in any of the examples studied (which is not in contradiction to the exponential growth found in the literature for many-body systems, i.e. fields). On the other hand, the plateau (saturated) value of OTOC reached at long times decreases with temperature in a simple and universal way: $\exp(\mathrm{const.}/T^2)$ for strong chaos (including random matrices) and $\exp(\mathrm{const.}/T)$ for weak chaos. For small matrices and sufficiently complex operators, there is also another, high-temperature regime where the saturated OTOC grows with temperature. Therefore, the plateau OTOC value is a meaningful indicator of few-body quantum chaos. We also discuss some general consequences of our findings for the AdS/CFT duality.

hep-th↗

arXiv2019

Spontaneous isotropy breaking for vortices in nonlinear left-handed metamaterials

We explore numerically and analytically the pattern formation and symmetry breaking of beams propagating through left-handed (negative) nonlinear metamaterials. When the input beam is a vortex with topological charge (winding number) $Q$, the initially circular (isotropic) beam acquires the symmetry of a polygon with $Q$, $2Q$ or $3Q$ sides, depending on the details of the response functions of the material. Within an effective field-theory model, this phenomenon turns out to be a case of spontaneous dynamical symmetry breaking described by a Landau-Ginzburg functional. Complex nonlinear dependence of the magnetic permittivity on the magnetic field of the beam plays a central role, as it introduces branch cuts in the mean-field solution, and permutations among different branches give rise to discrete symmetries of the patterns. By considering loop corrections in the effective Landau-Ginzburg field theory we obtain reasonably accurate predictions of the numerical results.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2019

The bound on chaos for closed strings in Anti-de Sitter black hole backgrounds

We perform a systematic study of the maximum Lyapunov exponent values $λ$ for the motion of classical closed strings in Anti-de Sitter black hole geometries with spherical, planar and hyperbolic horizons. Analytical estimates from the linearized variational equations together with numerical integrations predict the bulk Lyapunov exponent value as $λ\approx 2πTn$, where $n$ is the winding number of the string. The celebrated bound on chaos stating that $λ\leq 2πT$ is thus systematically modified for winding strings in the bulk. Within gauge/string duality, such strings apparently correspond to complicated operators which either do not move on Regge trajectories, or move on subleading trajectories with an unusual slope. Depending on the energy scale, the out-of-time-ordered correlation functions of these operators may still obey the bound $2πT$, or they may violate it like the bulk exponent. We do not know exactly why the bound on chaos can be modified but the indication from the gauge/string dual viewpoint is that the correlation functions of the dual gauge operators never factorize and thus the original derivation of the bound on chaos does not apply.

hep-th↗

arXiv2017

Quantum criticality in photorefractive optics: vortices in laser beams and antiferromagnets

We study vortex patterns in a prototype nonlinear optical system: counterpropagating laser beams in a photorefractive crystal, with or without the background photonic lattice. The vortices are effectively planar and described by the winding number and the "flavor" index, stemming from the fact that we have two parallel beams propagating in opposite directions. The problem is amenable to the methods of statistical field theory and generalizes the Berezinsky-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition of the XY model to the "two-flavor" case. In addition to the familiar conductor and insulator phases, we also have the perfect conductor (vortex proliferation in both beams/"flavors") and the frustrated insulator (energy costs of vortex proliferation and vortex annihilation balance each other). In the presence of disorder in the background lattice, a novel phase appears which shows long-range correlations and absence of long-range order, thus being analogous to spin glasses. An important benefit of this approach is that qualitative behavior of patterns can be known without intensive numerical work over large areas of the parameter space. More generally, we would like to draw attention to connections between the (classical) pattern-forming systems in photorefractive optics and the methods of (quantum) condensed matter and field theory: on one hand, we use the field-theoretical methods (renormalization group, replica formalism) to analyze the patterns; on the other hand, the observed phases are analogous to those seen in magnetic systems, and make photorefractive optics a fruitful testing ground for condensed matter systems. As an example, we map our system to a doped $O(3)$ antiferromagnet with $\mathbb{Z}_2$ defects, which has the same structure of the phase diagram.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2016

Confinement/deconfinement transition from symmetry breaking in gauge/gravity duality

We study the confinement/deconfinement transition in a strongly coupled system triggered by an independent symmetry-breaking quantum phase transition in gauge/gravity duality. The gravity dual is an Einstein-scalar-dilaton system with AdS near-boundary behavior and soft wall interior at zero scalar condensate. We study the cases of neutral and charged condensate separately. In the former case the condensation breaks the discrete $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry while a charged condensate breaks the continuous $U(1)$ symmetry. After the condensation of the order parameter, the non-zero vacuum expectation value of the scalar couples to the dilaton, changing the soft wall geometry into a non-confining and anisotropically scale-invariant infrared metric. In other words, the formation of long-range order is immediately followed by the deconfinement transition and the two critical points coincide. The confined phase has a scale -- the confinement scale (energy gap) which vanishes in the deconfined case. Therefore, the breaking of the symmetry of the scalar ($\mathbb{Z}_2$ or $U(1)$) in turn restores the scaling symmetry in the system and neither phase has a higher overall symmetry than the other. When the scalar is charged the phase transition is continuous which goes against the Ginzburg-Landau theory where such transitions generically only occur discontinuously. This phenomenon has some commonalities with the scenario of deconfined criticality. The mechanism we have found has applications mainly in effective field theories such as quantum magnetic systems. We briefly discuss these applications and the relation to real-world systems.

hep-th↗