Evidence for fast thermalization in the plane-wave matrix model

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through numerical simulations that the classical evolution of the plane-wave matrix model exhibits rapid thermalization, especially in configurations resembling black hole formation from D-brane collisions.

Contribution

It provides the first numerical evidence of fast thermalization in the plane-wave matrix model with semiclassical initial conditions, linking to black hole duals.

Findings

Configurations with sufficient kinetic energy collapse to small sizes.

Rapid decay of autocorrelation functions indicating fast thermalization.

Evidence of black hole formation from D-brane collision simulations.

Abstract

We perform a numerical simulation of the classical evolution of the plane-wave matrix model with semiclassical initial conditions. Some of these initial conditions thermalize and are dual to a black hole forming from the collision of D-branes in the plane wave geometry. In particular, we consider a large fuzzy sphere (a D2-brane) plus a single eigenvalue (a D0-particle) going exactly through the center of the fuzzy sphere and aimed to intersect it. Including quantum fluctuations of the off-diagonal modes in the initial conditions, with sufficient kinetic energy the configuration collapses to a small size. We also find evidence for fast thermalization: rapidly decaying autocorrelation functions at late times with respect to the natural time scale of the system.