English

Timelike BKL singularities and chaos in AdS/CFT

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-05-25 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We study the nature of a family of curvature singularities which are precisely the timelike cousins of the spacelike singularities studied by Belinski, Khalatnikov, and Lifshitz (BKL). We show that the approach to the singularity can be modeled by a billiard ball problem on hyperbolic space, just as in the case of BKL. For pure gravity, generic chaotic behavior is retained in (3+1) dimensions, and we provide evidence that it disappears in higher dimensions. We speculate that such singularities, if occurring in AdS/CFT and of the chaotic variety, may be interpreted as (transient) chaotic renormalization group flows which exhibit features reminiscent of chaotic duality cascades.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1601.02599,
  title  = {Timelike BKL singularities and chaos in AdS/CFT},
  author = {Edgar Shaghoulian and Huajia Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.02599},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

22 pages plus appendices. v2: references added and relation to earlier work clarified

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:27:10.444Z