Thermalization of Holographic Excited States

Abstract: We propose a real time holographic framework to study thermalization processes of a family of QFT excited states. The construction builds on Skenderis-van Rees's holographic duals to QFT Schwinger-Keldysh complex-time ordered paths. Thermalization is explored choosing a set of observables $F_n$ which essentially isolate the excited state contribution. Focusing on theories defined on compact manifolds and with excited states defined in terms of Euclidean path integrals, we identify boundary conditions that allow to avoid any number of modes in the initial field state. In the large conformal dimensions regime, we give precise prescriptions on how to compute the observables in terms of bulk geodesics.