English

Lifshitz Singularities

High Energy Physics - Theory 2013-05-30 v2

Abstract

Lifshitz spacetimes are possible gravitational duals to strongly coupled field theories with an anisotropic scaling symmetry. These spacetimes however, have a null curvature singularity. We find that higher dimensional embeddings of Lifshitz also have a similar singularity. We study the propagation of test strings in this background and find that they become infinitely excited if they try to propagate through the singularity. This means that the Lifshitz geometry is unstable and will receive large corrections in string theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1111.1243,
  title  = {Lifshitz Singularities},
  author = {Gary T. Horowitz and Benson Way},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1111.1243},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

14 pages; v2: comment added

R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:31:16.908Z