String Theory Journal Club

Studying the notion of scrambling or chaos in non-equilibrium systems is an active area of research which may uncover some interesting physics behind thermalization or ergodicity in an open system as well as dynamics of blackhole creation or evaporation in holography. Floquet CFTs provide us with an analytically tractable class of models for studying certain out of equilibrium properties. The most interesting feature of such floquet CFTs is the emergence of a rich phase structure in the parameter space of the theory – the so-called heating phase, non-heating phase, and a transition between them. I will summarize some of our recent results and new features on computations of Out of Time Ordered Correlators (OTOC) in Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) subjected to either discrete or continuous drive protocols and how they are different from the behavior of OTOCs in thermal equilibrium. I will also discuss some ongoing work on the holographic realizations of different phases in the same setup.