Abstract |
In this talk I present three topics.
In the first part, I talk about the butterfly effect and the role
of out-of-time-order correlators in diagnosing chaos. Maldacena,
Shenker, and Stanford discovered a sharp bound on the rate of growth
of chaos in thermal quantum systems. This is saturated by black holes
in AdS/CFT. I show that (perhaps contrary to some expectations)
there are maximally chaotic quantum systems that do not contain gravity.
In the second part, I consider integrable string motion
and describe a new discrete way of computing the time-evolution.
In the third part, I study pair-production of cusps on a string.
Initially, the static string stretches between two points on the boundary.
Perturbing one of the endpoints creates a large propagating wave.
The non-linear time-evolution produces energy cascades which result
in the creation of cusps on the string. These correspond to singular solitons
in the underlying generalized sinh-Gordon theory. |