AdS (In)stability: Lessons From The Scalar Field

Understand

We argued in arXiv:1408.0624 that the quartic scalar field in AdS has features that could be instructive for answering the gravitational stability question of AdS.

• Indeed, the conserved charges identified there have recently been observed in the full gravity theory as well.
• In this paper, we continue our investigation of the scalar field in AdS and provide evidence that in the Two-Time Formalism (TTF), even for initial conditions that are far from quasi-periodicity, the energy in the higher modes at late times is exponentially suppressed in the mode number.
• Based on this and some related observations, we argue that there is no thermalization in the scalar TTF model within time-scales that go as $\sim 1/\epsilon^2$, where $\epsilon$ measures the initial amplitude (with only low-lying modes excited).