Stringy effects in scrambling

TL;DR

This paper investigates stringy and Planckian corrections to holographic chaos calculations, revealing that elastic string effects weaken chaos signatures while inelastic effects are minimal but potentially detectable through specific correlators.

Contribution

It extends previous Einstein gravity analyses by incorporating stringy and quantum corrections, providing new insights into chaos dynamics in holographic systems.

Findings

Elastic string corrections weaken chaos signals

Inelastic effects have a small but potentially detectable impact

Proposes a new correlator to observe inelastic effects

Abstract

In [1] we gave a precise holographic calculation of chaos at the scrambling time scale. We studied the influence of a small perturbation, long in the past, on a two-sided correlation function in the thermofield double state. A similar analysis applies to squared commutators and other out-of-time-order one-sided correlators [2-4]. The essential bulk physics is a high energy scattering problem near the horizon of an AdS black hole. The above papers used Einstein gravity to study this problem; in the present paper we consider stringy and Planckian corrections. Elastic stringy corrections play an important role, effectively weakening and smearing out the development of chaos. We discuss their signature in the boundary field theory, commenting on the extension to weak coupling. Inelastic effects, although important for the evolution of the state, leave a parametrically small imprint on the correlators that we study. We briefly discuss ways to diagnose these small corrections, and we propose another correlator where inelastic effects are order one.