Universality of Abrupt Holographic Quenches

TL;DR

This paper analytically studies rapid quenches in holographic conformal field theories, revealing a universal scaling behavior that depends solely on the operator's conformal dimension near the UV fixed point, with divergence issues for certain operator dimensions.

Contribution

It demonstrates a universal scaling law for the response of holographic CFTs to abrupt quenches, highlighting the dependence on operator dimensions and identifying divergence conditions.

Findings

Universal scaling behavior depends only on operator dimension.

Divergence of work done occurs for operators with dimension between d/2 and d.

Scaling laws are derived analytically for rapid quenches in holographic models.

Abstract

We make an analytic investigation of rapid quenches of relevant operators in d-dimensional holographic CFT's, which admit a dual gravity description. We uncover a universal scaling behaviour in the response of the system, which depends only on the conformal dimension of the quenched operator in the vicinity of the ultraviolet fixed point of the theory. Unless the amplitude of the quench is scaled appropriately, the work done on a system during the quench diverges in the limit of abrupt quenches for operators with dimension $\frac{d}{2} \le\Delta < d$.