Holographic thermalization in Gauss-Bonnet gravity

In the spirit of AdS/CFT correspondence, we study the thermalization of a dual conformal field theory to Gauss-Bonnet gravity by modeling a thin-shell of dust that interpolates between a pure AdS and a Gauss-Bonnet AdS black brane. The renormalized geodesic length and minimal area surface, which in the dual conformal field theory correspond to two-point correlation function and expectation value of Wilson loop, are investigated respectively as thermalization probes. The result shows that as the Gauss-Bonnet coefficient increases, the thermalization time decreases for both the thermalization probes, which can also be confirmed by studying the motion profile of the geodesic and minimal area surface. In addition, for both the renormalized geodesic length and minimal area surface, there is an overlapped region for a fixed boundary separation, which implies that the Gauss-Bonnet coupling constant has little effect on the thermalization probes there. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.