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  • Open Access

Higher-spin localized shocks

Diandian Wang1,* and Zi-Yue Wang2,†

  • *Contact author: diandianwang@fas.harvard.edu
  • †Contact author: zi-yue@physics.ucsb.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 066006 – Published 10 September, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/fpbn-pkyh

Abstract

In the context of anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory , gravitational shockwaves serve as a geometric manifestation of boundary quantum chaos. We study this connection in general diffeomorphism-invariant theories involving an arbitrary number of bosonic fields. Specifically, we demonstrate that theories containing spin-2 or higher-spin fields generally admit classical localized shockwave solutions on black hole backgrounds, whereas spin-0 and spin-1 theories do not. As in the gravitational case, these higher-spin shockwaves provide a means to compute the out-of-time-order correlator. Both the Lyapunov exponent and the butterfly velocity are found to universally agree with predictions from pole skipping. In particular, higher-spin fields lead to a Lyapunov exponent that violates the chaos bound and a butterfly velocity that may exceed the speed of light.

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Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. D 112, 066006– Published 10 September, 2025
  • Received 12 July 2025
  • Accepted 16 August 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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