Thermal stress tensor correlators near lightcone and holography

• Published in: The journal of high energy physics Vol. 2023; no. 11; pp. 107 - 33
• Main Authors: Esper, Chantelle, Huang, Kuo-Wei, Karlsson, Robin, Parnachev, Andrei, Valach, Samuel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 17.11.2023; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: AdS-CFT Correspondence; Classical and Quantum Gravitation; Correlation; Couplings; Elementary Particles; Fourier transforms; Gravity; High energy physics; Holography; Mathematical analysis; Operators (mathematics); Physics; Physics and Astronomy; Quantum Field Theories; Quantum Field Theory; Quantum Physics; Regular Article - Theoretical Physics; Relativity Theory; Scale and Conformal Symmetries; Stress tensors; String Theory; Tensors; Thermal stress; Scale and Conformal Symmetries; AdS-CFT Correspondence
• ISSN: 1029-8479; 1029-8479
• DOI: 10.1007/JHEP11(2023)107

A bstract We consider thermal stress-tensor two-point functions in holographic theories in the near-lightcone regime and analyse them using the operator product expansion (OPE). In the limit we consider only the leading-twist multi-stress tensors contribute and the correlators depend on a particular combination of lightcone momenta. We argue that such correlators are described by three universal functions, which can be holographically computed in Einstein gravity; higher-derivative terms in the gravitational Lagrangian enter the arguments of these functions via the cubic stress-tensor couplings and the thermal stress-tensor expectation value in the dual CFT. We compute the retarded correlators and observe that in addition to the perturbative OPE, which contributes to the real part, there is a non-perturbative contribution to the imaginary part.