Higher-spin localized shocks
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.19785,
title = {Higher-spin localized shocks},
author = {Diandian Wang and Zi-Yue Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.19785},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
16 pages + references