Lifshitz Singularities

TL;DR

This paper investigates Lifshitz spacetimes, revealing their null curvature singularities and demonstrating that string propagation becomes infinitely excited near these singularities, indicating instability and potential corrections in string theory.

Contribution

It shows that higher-dimensional Lifshitz spacetimes share singularities and that string excitations near these singularities imply the geometries are unstable in string theory.

Findings

Lifshitz spacetimes have null curvature singularities.

Test strings become infinitely excited near the singularity.

Lifshitz geometries are unstable and receive large corrections.

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.