Pathologies in Asymptotically Lifshitz Spacetimes

Understand

There has been significant interest in the last several years in studying possible gravitational duals, known as Lifshitz spacetimes, to anisotropically scaling field theories by adding matter to distort the asymptotics of an AdS spacetime.

• We point out that putative ground state for the most heavily studied example of such a spacetime, that with a flat spatial section, suffers from a naked singularity and further point out this singularity is not resolvable by any known stringy effect.
• We review the reasons one might worry that asymptotically Lifshitz spacetimes are unstable and employ the initial data problem to study the stability of such systems.
• Rather surprisingly this question, and even the initial value problem itself, for these spacetimes turns out to generically not be well-posed.