Chaos on the mass shell
Abstract
We study particle production in high-energy states for theories given by an RG flow between an asymptotically free or conformal theory in the UV and a massive theory in the IR. Using the framework of detector matching, we argue that distributions of produced particles satisfy universal evolution equations with energy, determined by the spectrum of light-ray operators of the UV theory. In particular, we interpret the UV Chew-Frautschi plot as a wave equation for particle densities on the mass shell, evolving with energy. (When the UV theory is a CFT, this wave equation is the same one that controls the spread of chaos in hyperbolic space at a particular temperature.) We test these ideas for integrable flows in 2d CFTs, finding an independent derivation of the evolution equations in terms of the thermodynamics of a Feynman gas. We also discuss consequences for 4d gauge theories, including the presence of a BFKL contrail produced by an outgoing wave of hadron number density.
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BibTeX
@misc{homrich2026chaos,
title = {{Chaos on the mass shell}},
author = {Alexandre Homrich and David Simmons-Duffin and George Yuzhe Zhou},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.03787},
eprint = {2611.03787},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03787},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Chaos on the mass shell
AU - Alexandre Homrich
AU - David Simmons-Duffin
AU - George Yuzhe Zhou
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.03787
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03787
AB - We study particle production in high-energy states for theories given by an RG flow between an asymptotically free or conformal theory in the UV and a massive theory in the IR. Using the framework of detector matching, we argue that distributions of produced particles satisfy universal evolution equations with energy, determined by the spectrum of light-ray operators of the UV theory. In particular, we interpret the UV Chew-Frautschi plot as a wave equation for particle densities on the mass shell, evolving with energy. (When the UV theory is a CFT, this wave equation is the same one that controls the spread of chaos in hyperbolic space at a particular temperature.) We test these ideas for integrable flows in 2d CFTs, finding an independent derivation of the evolution equations in terms of the thermodynamics of a Feynman gas. We also discuss consequences for 4d gauge theories, including the presence of a BFKL contrail produced by an outgoing wave of hadron number density.
ER -