Notes on frequencies and timescales in nonequilibrium Green's functions

Abstract

We discuss the ringdown behavior of the nonequilibrium Green's function in a strongly coupled theory with the holographic dual with a focus on quasinormal-mode equilibration. We study the time resolved spectral function for a probe scalar in Vaidya-AdS spacetime in detail as a complement to the preceding work arXiv:1603.06935 using further numerical results in very nonadiabatic temperature changes. It is shown that the relaxation of the nonequilibrium spectral function obtained through the Wigner transform is governed by the lowest quasinormal mode frequency. The timescale of the background temperature change is also observed in the frequency analysis. We then consider a toy model motivated by the quasinormal mode behavior and discuss these main features in numerical results are simply realized.