Out-of-Time-Ordered Commutators (OTOCs), representing a key diagnostic for scrambling as a facet of short-time quantum chaos, have attracted wide-ranging interest, from many-body physics to quantum gravity. By means of a suitable form of the Wigner-Moyal expansion, and invoking ensemble equivalence in statistical physics, we provide a consistent approach to the growth rate of the OTOC for many-body systems with chaotic classical limit where both the classical Lyapunov exponent and the quantum nature of the density of states enter. Applying this construction to quantized high-dimensional hyperbolic motion, i.e., a quantum chaotic system that exhibits gravity-like correlation functions in the late-time regime, we compute the OTOC growth rate Λ as a function of the number of degrees of freedom, f, and inverse temperature, β. We show that the scaled growth rate, Λ/f, can be described by a universal function of fβ and displays a cross-over from classical to quantum behavior as we increase f and/or lower the temperature. In the deep quantum regime of infinite f, we find maximally fast scrambling in the sense of the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford bound on chaos. This elucidates the non-perturbative mechanism underlying the saturation of the bound via quantum contributions to the mean density of states, and it provides further support for this dynamical system as a dual to two-dimensional quantum gravity. In this way, we present first evidence of maximally fast scrambling in a quantum chaotic system with a well-defined classical Hamiltonian limit, without invoking any external mechanism such as (disorder) averaging.
It has been conjectured by Maldacena, Shenker, and Stanford [J. Maldacena, S. H. Shenker, and D. Stanford, J. High Energy Phys. 08 (2016) 106] that the exponential growth rate of the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC)
F(t) has a universal upper bound $2\ensuremath{\pi}{k}_{B}T/\ensuremath{\hbar}$. Here we introduce a one-parameter family of out-of-time-ordered correlators ${F}_{\ensuremath{\gamma}}(t)$ ($0\ensuremath{\le}\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\le}1$), which has as good properties as
F(t) as a regularization of the out-of-time-ordered part of the squared commutator $\ensuremath{\langle}{[\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{A}(t),\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{B}(0)]}^{2}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ that diagnoses quantum many-body chaos, and coincides with
F(t) at $\ensuremath{\gamma}=1/2$. We rigorously prove that if ${F}_{\ensuremath{\gamma}}(t)$ shows a transient exponential growth for all $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ in $0\ensuremath{\le}\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\le}1$, that is, if the OTOC shows an exponential growth regardless of the choice of the regularization, then the growth rate $\ensuremath{\lambda}$ does not depend on the regularization parameter $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ and satisfies the inequality $\ensuremath{\lambda}\ensuremath{\le}2\ensuremath{\pi}{k}_{B}T/\ensuremath{\hbar}$.
It was conjectured by Maldacena, Shenker and Stanford that the classical chaos can be diagnosed in thermal quantum systems by using an out-of-time-order correlation function. The Artin dynamical system defined on the fundamental region of the modular group SL(2,Z) represents a well defined example of a highly chaotic dynamical system in its classical regime. We investigated the influence of the classical chaotic behaviour on the quantum–mechanical properties of the Artin system calculating the corresponding out-of-time-order thermal quantum–mechanical correlation functions. We demonstrated that the two- and four-point correlation functions of the Liouiville-like operators decay exponentially with temperature dependent exponents and that the square of the commutator of the Liouiville-like operators separated in time grows exponentially.
Out-of-Time-Ordered Commutators (OTOCs), representing a key diagnostic for scrambling as a facet of short-time quantum chaos, have attracted wide-ranging interest, from many-body physics to quantum gravity. By means of a suitable form of the Wigner-Moyal expansion, and invoking ensemble equivalence in statistical physics, we provide a consistent approach to the growth rate of the OTOC for many-body systems with chaotic classical limit where both the classical Lyapunov exponent and the quantum nature of the density of states enter. Applying this construction to quantized high-dimensional hyperbolic motion, i.e., a quantum chaotic system that exhibits gravity-like correlation functions in the late-time regime, we compute the OTOC growth rate
Λ as a function of the number of degrees of freedom,
f, and inverse temperature,
β.
We show that the scaled growth rate,
Λ/f, can be described by a universal function of
fβ and displays a cross-over from classical to quantum behavior as we increase
f and/or lower the temperature. In the deep quantum regime of infinite
f, we find maximally fast scrambling in the sense of the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford bound on chaos. This elucidates the non-perturbative mechanism underlying the saturation of the bound via quantum contributions to the mean density of states, and it provides further support for this dynamical system as a dual to two-dimensional quantum gravity. In this way, we present first evidence of maximally fast scrambling in a quantum chaotic system with a well-defined classical Hamiltonian limit, without invoking any external mechanism such as (disorder) averaging.
Abstract Chaos, in quantum systems, can be diagnosed by certain out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) that obey the chaos bound of Maldacena, Shenker, and Stanford (MSS). We begin by deriving a dispersion relation for this class of OTOCs, implying that they must satisfy many more constraints beyond the MSS bound. Motivated by this observation, we perform a systematic analysis obtaining an infinite set of constraints on the OTOC. This infinite set includes the MSS bound as the leading constraint. In addition, it also contains subleading bounds that are highly constraining, especially when the MSS bound is saturated by the leading term. These new bounds, among other things, imply that the MSS bound cannot be exactly saturated over any duration of time, however short. Furthermore, we derive a sharp bound on the Lyapunov exponent λ2 ≤
β6π 6 π β of the subleading correction to maximal chaos.
The rate at which information scrambles in a quantum system can be quantified using out-of-time-ordered correlators. A remarkable prediction is that the associated Lyapunov exponent λ that quantifies the scrambling rate in chaotic systems obeys a universal bound λ < 2πkBT/h. Previous numerical and analytical studies have indicated that this bound has a quantum-statistical origin. Here, we use path-integral techniques to show that a minimal theory to reproduce this bound involves adding contributions from quantum thermal fluctuations (describing quantum tunneling and zero-point energy) to classical dynamics. By propagating a model quantum-Boltzmannconserving classical dynamics for a system with a barrier, we show that the bound is controlled by the stability of thermal fluctuations around the barrier instanton (a delocalized structure which dominates the tunneling statistics). This stability requirement appears to be general, implying that there is a close relation between the formation of instantons, or related delocalized structures, and the imposition of the quantum-chaos bound.