Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank M. Dodelson, L. Iliesiu, D. Jafferis, M. Kulaxizi, H. Liu, V. Niarchos and S. Zhiboedov for useful discussions. CE was supported in part by the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Fellowship under project award number GOIPG/2022/887. KWH was supported in part by the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship under project award number GOIPD/2022/288. RK was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 949077). AP and SV were supported in part by the Irish Research Council Consolidator Award No. IRCLA/2017/82. The research of AP was also supported in part by the Science Foundation Ireland and by NSF under Grant No. NSF PHY-1748958. AP thanks KITP Santa Barbara and Harvard University, where part of this work was completed, for hospitality.
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Esper, C., Huang, KW., Karlsson, R. et al. Thermal stress tensor correlators near lightcone and holography. J. High Energ. Phys. 2023, 107 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2023)107
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP11(2023)107