Near-horizon chaos beyond Einstein gravity

Abstract: We investigate chaos in the dynamics of massless particles near the horizon of static spherically symmetric black holes in two well-motivated models of $f(R)$ gravity. In both these models, we probe chaos in the particle trajectories (under suitable harmonic confinement) in the vicinity of the black hole horizons, for a set of initial conditions. The particle trajectories, associated Poincar\'e sections, and Lyapunov exponents clearly illustrate the role played by the black hole horizon in the growth of chaos. We find that with increasing energy, the particle trajectories explore regions closer to the black hole horizon, with reduced overlap between two initially close trajectories. We demonstrate how this energy range is controlled by the parameters of the modified gravity theory under consideration. The growth of chaos in such a classical setting is known to respect a surface gravity bound arising from universal aspects of particle dynamics close to the black hole horizon [K. Hashimoto and N. Tanahashi, Phys. Rev. D 95, 024007 (2017)], analogous to the quantum Maldacena, Shenker, and Stanford bound [J. Maldacena et al., J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2016) 106]. Interestingly, both models studied in our work respect the bound, in contrast to some of the other models of $f(R)$ gravity in the existing literature. The work serves as a motivation to use chaos as an additional tool to probe Einstein gravity in the strong gravity regime in the vicinity of black hole horizons.