On holographic thermalization and gravitational collapse of massless scalar fields

Abstract

In this paper we study thermalization in a strongly coupled system via AdS/CFT. Initially, the energy is injected into the system by turning on a spatially homogenous scalar source coupled to a marginal composite operator. The thermalization process is studied by numerically solving Einstein's equations coupled to a massless scalar field in the Poincare patch of AdS_5. We define a thermalization time t_T on the AdS side, which has an interpretation in terms of a spacelike Wilson loop <W(l =1/T)> in CFT. Here T is the thermal equilibrium temperature. We study both cases with the source turned on in short(Delta t <= 1/T) and long(Delta t >= 1/T) durations. In the former case, the thermalization time t_T = g_t/T <= 1/T and the coefficient g_t = 0.73 in the limit Delta t <= 0.02/T. In the latter case, we find double- and multiple-collapse solutions, which may be interpreted as the gravity duals of two- or multi-stage thermalization in CFT. In all the cases our results indicate that such a strongly coupled system thermalizes in a typical time scale t_T=O(1)/T.

25 papers, 13 figures, Minor modifications, details of numerics added, references added, final version to appear in JHEP

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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Nonlocal probes of thermalization in holographic quenches with spectral methods
• On holographic thermalization and gravitational collapse of tachyonic scalar fields
• Holographic thermalization and gravitational collapse in the spacetime dominated by quintessence dark energy
• Gravitational infall in the hard wall model
• A semi-holographic model for heavy-ion collisions
• Holographic thermalization in noncommutative geometry
• Non-equilibrium scalar two point functions in AdS/CFT
• Gravitational collapse of massless scalar field in $f(R)$ gravity
• Universality in holographic entropy production
• Holographic Quenches and Fermionic Spectral Functions
• Oscillating Shells in Anti-de Sitter Space
• Holographic approach to thermalization in general anisotropic theories