Journal of High Energy Physics (May 2023)

From locality to irregularity: introducing local quenches in massive scalar field theory

  • Dmitry S. Ageev,
  • Aleksandr I. Belokon,
  • Vasilii V. Pushkarev

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2023)188
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2023, no. 5
pp. 1 – 44

Abstract

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Abstract In this paper, we initiate the study of operator local quenches in non-conformal field theories. We consider the dynamics of excited local states in massive scalar field theory in an arbitrary spacetime dimension and generalize the well-known two-dimensional CFT results. We derive the energy density, U(1)-charge density and ϕ 2(x)-condensate post-quench dynamics, and identify different regimes of their evolution depending on the values of the field mass and the quench regularization parameter. For local quenches in higher-dimensional free massless scalar theories, we reproduce the structure of the available holographic results. We also investigate the local quenches in massive scalar field theory on a cylinder and show that they cause an erratic and chaotic-like evolution of observables with a complicated localization/delocalization pattern.

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