The Holographic dual of a finite energy shockwave

Speaker: Daliang Li, Harvard University

When: December 12, 2018 (Wed), 11:00AM to 12:00PM (add to my calendar)
Location: PRB 595

This event is part of the HET Seminar Series.

To understand holography, it is important to know how CFTs encode finite deformations of the bulk metric. A great entry point to this problem is to study finite energy shockwaves, which are simple and universal. Even at finite deformations they preserve linearity in the equation of motion. They are also insensitive to higher derivative corrections to gravity. Their existence in gravity hints at a corresponding universal structure in the way multi-stress tensor operators appear in the OPE. We find this structure in CFT2 and show how it matches correlators computed holographically on a shockwave background in AdS3. We demonstrate that the CFT dual involves multi light ray operators. We also discuss the implications in higher dimensions.