A moving mirror in AdS space as a toy model for holographic thermalization

Abstract

It is expected that thermalization may be described within gauge/gravity duality by considering time-dependent configurations on the gravity side of the correspondence, for instance a gravitational collapse of a matter configuration in Anti-de Sitter space. As a step towards the ambitious goal of describing such a configuration, we investigate a simple time-dependent toy model in which a mirror moves in the radial direction of Anti-de Sitter space. For this configuration, we establish a procedure for calculating two-point functions of scalar fluctuations, based on a WKB approximation. We test our method on two sample trajectories for the mirror, and find that the singularity structure of the two-point functions is in agreement with geometric optics.