A bstract We develop a finite-dimensional formulation of the recently introduced notion of “timelike entanglement”, defined in terms of two-point functions between operators supported on different Cauchy slices. Using a local orthonormal operator basis, we recast this construction in terms of a generalized response tensor . Building on this, we introduce a generalized spacetime density kernel (GSDK) corresponding to higher point correlation functions, including time-ordered as well as out-of-time-ordered correlators. Motivated by the structure of Haar probe averaging, we contract the (2 N )-leg GSDK with cyclic permutation operators and thereby define a kernel form factor . This quantity is computable even when Haar averaging is not feasible, and it reduces to the (2 N )-th moment of the spectral form factor, evaluated at an N -enhanced effective temperature. The correlation functions of the GSDK operators also yield the SFF, with an effective (1/ N )-reduction of the physical time-scales. The GSDK places both early time scrambling diagnostics and late time spectral statistics on a similar footing and clarifies how higher-point correlators and non-trivial time ordering capture fine-grained dynamical information of a quantum system.
We develop a finite-dimensional formulation of the recently introduced notion of ``timelike entanglement'', defined in terms of two-point functions between operators supported on different Cauchy slices. Using a local orthonormal operator basis, we recast this construction in terms of a generalized response tensor. Building on this, we introduce a generalized spacetime density kernel (GSDK) corresponding to higher-point correlation functions, including time-ordered as well as out-of-time-ordered correlators. We show that the Haar-averaged
(2N)-point function yields the
(2N)-th moment of the spectral form factor (SFF), evaluated at an
N-enhanced effective temperature. The correlation functions of the GSDK operators also yield the SFF, with an effective
(1/N)-reduction of the physical time-scales. The GSDK places both scrambling diagnostics and spectral statistics on a similar footing and clarifies how higher-point correlators and non-trivial time ordering capture fine-grained dynamical information of a quantum system.
We investigate timelike entanglement measures derived from the spacetime density kernel in the Rosenzweig-Porter model and show that they sharply diagnose both eigenvector ergodicity and spectral chaos. For several Hilbert-space bipartitions, we compute the second Tsallis entropy, the entanglement imagitivity that quantifies non-Hermiticity, and Schatten-norm diagnostics of the kernel. The imagitivity and Frobenius norm exhibit rapid growth and high late-time plateaus in the ergodic regime, are suppressed in the localized regime, and show intermediate behavior in the fractal phase. The real part of the second Tsallis entropy displays a spectral form factor-like dip-ramp-plateau throughout the chaotic window and a suppressed ramp in the localized regime. We further introduce a kernel negativity, defined as the negative spectral weight of the Hermitian part of the kernel. This negativity equals the trace-norm distance to the set of positive semidefinite operators and the maximal witnessable negative quasiprobability, and its time-averaged value decreases across the ergodic-fractal-localized crossover in close correspondence with the fractal dimension.
We investigate timelike entanglement in quantum field theory using spacetime density matrices and provide a microscopic lattice realization. For a two-dimensional free real scalar field, we extend Gaussian diagonalization methods to the generally non-Hermitian reduced spacetime density matrix and determine its complete nonzero spectrum in the generic regular case, together with all integer Rényi moments. The real-time replica construction identifies these moments with Lorentzian branch-point twist-operator correlation functions. We test this identification against the full four-point function on a circle, boundary two-point functions with Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, and massive form-factor predictions, finding quantitative agreement in both magnitude and phase across distinct causal regimes. The boundary setup exhibits a finite causally connected window in which every integer Rényi entropy is real, showing that reality is not equivalent to causal disconnection. These results provide a microscopic lattice foundation for timelike entanglement and for Lorentzian twist-operator methods beyond equal-time regions.
We show the relation between the Heisenberg averaging of regularized 2-point out-of-time ordered correlation function and the 2-point spectral form factor in bosonic quantum mechanics. The generalization to all even-point is also discussed. We also do the direct extension from the bosonic quantum mechanics to the noninteracting scalar field theory. Finally, we find that the coherent state and large-[Formula: see text] approaches are useful in the late-time study. We find that the computation of the coherent state can be simplified by the Heisenberg averaging. Therefore, this provides a simplified way to probe the late-time quantum chaos through a coherent state. The large-[Formula: see text] result is also comparable to the [Formula: see text] numerical result in the large-[Formula: see text] quantum mechanics. This can justify that large-[Formula: see text] technique in bosonic quantum mechanics can probe the late time, not the early time. Because the quantitative behavior of large-[Formula: see text] can be captured from the [Formula: see text] numerical result, the realization in experiments should be possible.
We study real-time correlators $\ensuremath{\langle}\mathcal{O}(\mathbf{x},t)\mathcal{O}(0,0)\ensuremath{\rangle}$ of local operators in chaotic quantum many-body systems. These correlators show universal structure at late times, determined by the geometry of the dominant operator-space Feynman trajectories for the evolving operator $\mathcal{O}(\mathbit{x},t)$. These trajectories, which involve the operator contracting to a point at both the initial and final time, are qualitatively different from those that dominate the out-of-time-order correlation function. In the absence of conservation laws, local correlations decay exponentially: $\ensuremath{\langle}\mathcal{O}(\mathbf{x},t)\mathcal{O}(0,0)\ensuremath{\rangle}\ensuremath{\sim}exp(\ensuremath{-}{s}_{\text{eq}}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}r(\mathbit{v})\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}t)$, where $\mathbit{v}=\mathbit{x}/t$ defines a ray in spacetime, and $r(\mathbit{v})$ is a rate function associated with this ray. We express $r(\mathbit{v})$ in terms of cost functions for various spacetime structures. In
1+1D the operator histories can exhibit a phase transition at a critical value
vc of the ray velocity, which leads to a singular behavior in $r(\mathbit{v})$. At low velocities, the dominant Feynman histories are ``fat'': The operator grows to a size of order ${t}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ (with $\ensuremath{\alpha}=1/2$ in the simplest case) before contracting to a point again. At high velocities the trajectories are ``thin'': The operator always remains of order-one size. In a Haar-random quantum circuit, this transition maps to a simple binding transition for a pair of random walks, which represent the left and right spatial boundaries of the operator. In higher-dimensional systems, thin trajectories always dominate. We discuss the circumstances in which the butterfly velocity
vB can be deduced from a time-ordered two-point function, rather than the out-of-time ordered correlator. In the random circuit, correlators may also be computed in the framework of an effective Ising-like statistical mechanics model: we describe this calculation, as well as a special feature of the weights in the case of a
1+1D Haar-random brickwork circuit. The present paper addresses lattice models, but also suggests the possibility of morphological phase transitions for real-time Feynman diagrams in continuum quantum field theories.
Quantum chaos can be characterized by an exponential growth of the thermal out-of-time-order four-point function up to a scrambling time u[over ^]_{*}. We discuss generalizations of this statement for certain higher-point correlation functions. For concreteness, we study the Schwarzian theory of a one-dimensional time reparametrization mode, which describes two-dimensional anti-de Sitter space (AdS_{2}) gravity and the low-energy dynamics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. We identify a particular set of 2k-point functions, characterized as being both "maximally braided" and "k-out of time order," which exhibit exponential growth until progressively longer time scales u[over ^]_{*}^{(k)}∼(k-1)u[over ^]_{*}. We suggest an interpretation as scrambling of increasingly fine grained measures of quantum information, which correspondingly take progressively longer time to reach their thermal values.