Time dependent black holes and thermal equilibration

Abstract

We study aspects of a recently proposed exact time dependent black hole solution of IIB string theory using the AdS/CFT correspondence. The dual field theory is a thermal system in which initially a vacuum density for a non-conserved operator is turned on. We can see that in agreement with general thermal field theory expectation the system equilibrates: the expectation value of the non-conserved operator goes to zero exponentially and the entropy increases. In the field theory the process can be described quantitatively in terms of a thermofield state and exact agreement with the gravity answers is found.