In this paper, we initiate the study of the local quenches in non-conformal field theories. In particular, we consider the dynamics of excited local states in massive scalar field theory in an arbitrary spacetime dimension and generalize the well-known two-dimensional CFT results. We derive the energy density, U (1)-charge density and φ 2 (x)-condensate post-quench dynamics and identify different regimes of their evolution depending on the values of the field mass and the quench regularization parameter. For massless higher-dimensional local quenches we briefly compare the obtained free theory formulae with the available holographic results. We also investigate the local quenches in massive scalar field theory on a cylinder and show that they cause unexpected erratic and chaotic-like evolution of observables with a complicated localization/delocalization pattern of their dynamics.
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