Universality of Abrupt Holographic Quenches

We make an analytic investigation of rapid quenches of relevant operators in d-dimensional holographic conformal field theories, which admit a dual gravity description. We uncover a universal scaling behavior in the response of the system, which depends only on the conformal dimension of the quenched operator in the vicinity of the ultraviolet fixed point of the theory. Unless the amplitude of the quench is scaled appropriately, the work done on a system during the quench diverges in the limit of abrupt quenches for operators with dimension (d/2)≤Δ<d.