Fast and Slow Coherent Cascades in Anti-de Sitter Spacetime

We study the phase and amplitude dynamics of small perturbations in 3+1 dimensional Anti-de Sitter spacetime using the truncated resonant approximation, also known as the Two Time Framework (TTF). We analyse the phase spectrum for different classes of initial data and find that higher frequency modes turn on with coherently aligned phases. Combining numerical and analytical results, we conjecture that there is a class of initial conditions that collapse in infinite slow time and to which the well-studied case of the two-mode, equal energy initial data belongs. We additionally study perturbations that collapse in finite time, and find that the energy spectrum approaches a power law, with the energy per mode scaling approximately as the inverse first power of the frequency.Comment: 19 pages, multiple figures. v2: version published in CQ

Vacua and correlators in hyperbolic de Sitter space

We study the power - and bi -spectrum of vacuum fluctuations in a hyperbolic section of de Sitter space, comparing two states of physical interest: the Bunch-Davies and hyperbolic vacuum. We introduce a one -parameter family of de Sitter hyperbolic sections and their natural vacua, and identify a limit in which it reduces to the planar section and the corresponding Bunch -Davies vacuum state. Selecting the Bunch -Davies vacuum for a massless scalar field implies a mixed reduced density matrix in a hyperbolic section of de Sitter space. We stress that in the Bunch -Davies state the hyperbolic de Sitter $n$-point correlation functions have to match the planar de Sitter $n$-point correlation functions. The expressions for the planar and hyperbolic Bunch -Davies correlation functions only appear different because of the transformation from planar to hyperbolic coordinates. Initial state induced deviations from the standard inflationary predictions are instead obtained by considering the pure hyperbolic vacuum, as we verify explicitly by computing the power - and bi -spectrum. For the bi -spectrum in the hyperbolic vacuum we find that the corrections as compared to the standard Bunch -Davies result are not enhanced in specific momentum configurations and strongly suppressed for momenta large compared to the hyperbolic curvature scale. We close with some final remarks, in particular regarding the implications of these results for more realistic inflationary bubble scenarios.Comment: Added references, removed typos, added author, extensions in first section and conclusions. 34 pages, 4 figure

Position space analysis of the AdS (in)stability problem

We investigate whether arbitrarily small perturbations in global AdS space are generically unstable and collapse into black holes on the time scale set by gravitational interactions. We argue that current evidence, combined with our analysis, strongly suggests that a set of nonzero measure in the space of initial conditions does not collapse on this time scale. We perform an analysis in position space to study this puzzle, and our formalism allows us to directly study the vanishing-amplitude limit. We show that gravitational self-interaction leads to tidal deformations which are equally likely to focus or defocus energy, and we sketch the phase diagram accordingly. We also clarify the connection between gravitational evolution in global AdS and holographic thermalization.Comment: 40 pages, 12 figures, updated to the version published on JHE