Fermionic pole-skipping in holography

Abstract

We examine thermal Green’s functions of fermionic operators in quantum field theories with gravity duals. The calculations are performed on the gravity side using ingoing Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates. We find that at negative imaginary Matsubara frequencies and special values of the wavenumber, there are multiple solutions to the bulk equations of motion that are ingoing at the horizon and thus the boundary Green’s function is not uniquely defined. At these points in Fourier space a line of poles and a line of zeros of the correlator intersect. We analyze these ‘pole-skipping’ points in three-dimensional asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes where exact Green’s functions are known. We then generalize the procedure to higher-dimensional spacetimes and derive the generic form the boundary correlator takes near the pole-skipping points in momentum space. We also discuss the special case of a fermion with half-integer mass in the BTZ background. We discuss the implications and possible generalizations of the results.