Holographic approach to thermalization in general anisotropic theories

Abstract: We employ the holographic approach to study the thermalization in the quenched strongly-coupled field theories with very general anisotropic scalings including Lifshitz and hyperscaling violating fixed points. The holographic dual is a Vaidya-like time-dependent geometry where the asymptotic metric has general anisotropic scaling isometries. We find the Ryu-Takanayagi extremal surface and use it to calculate the time-dependent entanglement entropy between a strip region with width $2R$ and its outside region. In the special case with an isotropic metric, we also explore the entanglement entropy for a spherical region of radius $R$. The growth of the entanglement entropy characterizes the thermalization rate after a quench. We study the thermalization process in the early times and late times in both large $R$ and small $R$ limits. The allowed scaling parameter regions are constrained by the null energy conditions as well as the condition for the existence of the Ryu-Takanayagi extremal surfaces. This generalizes the previous works on this subject. All obtained results can be compared with experiments and other methods of probing thermalization.