Holographic subregion complexity under a thermal quench

TL;DR

This paper investigates how holographic subregion complexity evolves during a thermal quench in AdS/CFT, revealing initial growth, eventual saturation, and potential discontinuities depending on parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of subregion complexity dynamics under thermal quenches using the Vaidya-AdS model, highlighting new discontinuous behavior for large regions and fast quenches.

Findings

Complexity initially increases then saturates over time.

Discontinuous drops in complexity occur for large regions and rapid quenches.

The evolution depends on quench speed, region size, black hole mass, and spacetime dimension.

Abstract

We study the evolution of holographic subregion complexity under a thermal quench in this paper. From the subregion CV proposal in the AdS/CFT correspondence, the subregion complexity in the CFT is holographically captured by the volume of the codimension-one surface enclosed by the codimension-two extremal entanglement surface and the boundary subregion. Under a thermal quench, the dual gravitational configuration is described by a Vaidya-AdS spacetime. In this case we find that the holographic subregion complexity always increases at early time, and after reaching a maximum it decreases and gets to saturation. Moreover we notice that when the size of the strip is large enough and the quench is fast enough, in $AdS_{d+1}(d\geq3)$ spacetime the evolution of the complexity is discontinuous and there is a sudden drop due to the transition of the extremal entanglement surface. We discuss the effects of the quench speed, the strip size, the black hole mass and the spacetime dimension on the evolution of the subregion complexity in detail numerically.