Stringy Effects on Holographic Complexity: The Complete Volume in Dynamical Spacetimes

TL;DR

This paper explores how stringy higher-curvature effects influence holographic complexity in dynamical black hole spacetimes, revealing corrections to the volume proposal and universal behaviors in complexity growth and scrambling time.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of stringy corrections to holographic complexity in dynamical settings using the complete volume proposal.

Findings

Higher-curvature terms introduce explicit corrections to the CV proposal.

Complexity growth rate remains governed by conserved momentum despite null shell jumps.

Gauss-Bonnet corrections extend the critical time, maintaining universal logarithmic scrambling time dependence.

Abstract

We investigate the stringy effects on holographic complexity in $(d+1)$-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet gravity using the ``complete volume'' proposal for higher-curvature theories. Our analysis covers unperturbed eternal black holes, as well as the one-sided and two-sided Vaidya spacetimes. The one-sided geometry describes a null shell collapsing into the empty AdS vacuum to form a black hole, while the two-sided geometry represents a null shell injected into an eternal black hole background with arbitrary energy. For unperturbed backgrounds, higher-curvature terms introduce explicit corrections to the standard CV proposal, giving rise to a ``competition effect'' absent in the uncorrected framework. In the dynamical settings, we demonstrate that despite novel jumps in the canonical velocities across the null shell, the complexity growth rate remains universally governed by the conserved momentum, just as in Einstein gravity. Furthermore, our two-sided shock wave analysis reveals that Gauss-Bonnet corrections prolong the critical time, preserving the universal logarithmic dependence for the scrambling time.