The late time behaviour of OTOCs involving generic non-conserved local operators show exponential decay in chaotic many body systems. However, it has been recently observed that for certain holographic theories, the OTOC involving the $U(1)$ conserved current for a gauge field instead varies diffusively at late times. The present work generalizes this observation to conserved currents corresponding to higher-form symmetries that belong to a wider class of symmetries known as generalized symmetries. We started by computing the late time behaviour of OTOCs involving $U(1)$ current operators in five dimensional AdS-Schwarzschild black hole geometry for the 2-form antisymmetric $B$-fields. The bulk solution for the $B$-field exhibits logarithmic divergences near the asymptotic AdS boundary which can be regularized by introducing a double trace deformation in the boundary CFT. Finally, we consider the more general case with antisymmetric $p$-form fields in arbitrary dimensions. In the scattering approach, the boundary OTOC can be written as an inner product between asymptotic 'in' and 'out' states which in our case is equivalent to computing the inner product between two bulk fields with and without a shockwave background. We observe that the late time OTOCs have power law tails which seems to be a universal feature of the higher-form fields with $U(1)$ charge conservation.
Higher-Order Corrections to Scrambling Dynamics in Brownian Spin SYK Models
College of Physics Science and Technology, Hebei University（河北大学物理科学与技术学院）；Hebei Key Laboratory of High-precision Computation and Application of Quantum Field Theory（河北省量子场论高精度计算与应用重点实验室）；Hebei Research Center of the Basic Discipline for Computational Physics（河北省计算物理学基础学科研究中心）；Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences (KITS), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学理论科学研究所（KITS））
Quantum dynamics is of fundamental interest and has implications in quantum information processing. The four-point out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) is traditionally used to quantify quantum information scrambling under many-body dynamics. Due to the OTOC's unusual time ordering, its measurement is challenging. We propose higher-point OTOCs to reveal early-time scrambling behavior, and present protocols to measure any higher-point OTOC using the shadow estimation method. The protocols circumvent the need for time-reversal evolution and ancillary control. They can be implemented in near-ter…
Quantum speed limits set an upper bound to the rate at which a quantum system can evolve and as such can be used to analyze the scrambling of information. To this end, we consider the survival probability of a thermofield double state under unitary time-evolution which is related to the analytic continuation of the partition function. We provide an exponential lower bound to the survival probability with a rate governed by the inverse of the energy fluctuations of the initial state. Further, we elucidate universal features of the non-exponential behavior at short and long times of evolution th…
Scrambling of quantum information can be conveniently quantified by so called out-of-time-order-correlators (OTOCs), whose measurements presents a formidable experimental challenge. Here we report on a method for the measurement of OTOCs based on the so-called two-point measurements scheme developed in the field of non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics. The scheme is of broader applicability than methods employed in current experiments and also provides a clear-cut interpretation of quantum information scrambling in terms of non-equilibrium fluctuations of thermodynamic quantities such as wor…
The quantum dynamics of isolated systems under quench condition exhibits a variety of interesting features depending on the integrable/chaotic nature of system. We study the exact dynamics of trivially integrable system of harmonic chains under a multiple quench protocol. Out of time ordered correlator of two Hermitian operators at large time displays scrambling in the thermodynamic limit. In this limit, the entanglement entropy and the central component of momentum distribution both saturate to a steady state value. We also show that reduced density matrix assumes the diagonal form long after…
Characterizing the work statistics of driven complex quantum systems is generally challenging because of the exponential growth with the system size of the number of transitions involved between different energy levels. We consider the quantum work distribution associated with the driving of chaotic quantum systems described by random matrix Hamiltonians and characterize exactly the work statistics associated with a sudden quench for arbitrary temperature and system size. Knowledge of the work statistics yields the Loschmidt echo dynamics of an entangled state between two copies of the system …
We apply a quantum teleportation protocol based on the Hayden-Preskill thought experiment to quantify how scrambling a given quantum evolution is. It has an advantage over the direct measurement of out-of-time ordered correlators when used to diagnose the information scrambling in the presence of decoherence effects stemming from a noisy quantum device. We demonstrate the protocol by applying it to two physical systems: Ising spin chain and SU(2) lattice Yang-Mills theory. To this end, we numerically simulate the time evolution of the two theories in the Hamiltonian formalism. The lattice Yang…
Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) have been extensively used over the last few years to study information scrambling and quantum chaos in many-body systems. In this paper, we extend the formalism of the averaged bipartite OTOC of Styliaris et al [Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 030601 (2021)] to the case of open quantum systems. The dynamics is no longer unitary but it is described by more general quantum channels (trace preserving, completely positive maps). This "open bipartite OTOC" can be treated in an exact analytical fashion and is shown to amount to a distance between two quantum channels. …
Scrambling, a process in which quantum information spreads over a complex quantum system becoming inaccessible to simple probes, happens in generic chaotic quantum many-body systems, ranging from spin chains, to metals, even to black holes. Scrambling can be measured using out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), which are closely tied to the growth of Heisenberg operators. In this work, we present a general method to calculate OTOCs of local operators in local one-dimensional systems based on approximating Heisenberg operators as matrix-product operators (MPOs). Contrary to the common belief …
The onset of quantum chaos in quantum field theory may be studied using out-of-time-order correlators at finite temperature. Recent work argued that a timescale logarithmic in the central charge emerged in the context of two-dimensional conformal field theories, provided the intermediate channel was dominated by the Virasoro identity block. This suggests a wide class of conformal field theories exhibit a version of fast scrambling. In the present work we study this idea in more detail. We begin by clarifying to what extent correlators of wavepackets built out of superpositions of primary opera…
Proof of a Universal Speed Limit on Fast Scrambling in Quantum Systems
Joint Quantum Institute and Department of Physics, University of Maryland（马里兰大学联合量子研究所与物理系）；Condensed Matter Theory Center, Department of Physics, University of Maryland（马里兰大学凝聚态理论中心与物理系）
We study local quenches in 1+1 dimensional conformal field theories at large-c by operators carrying higher spin charge. Viewing such states as solutions in Chern-Simons theory, representing infalling massive particles with spin-three charge in the BTZ background, we use the Wilson line prescription to compute the single-interval entanglement entropy (EE) and scrambling time following the quench. We find that the change in EE is finite (and real) only if the spin-three charge q is bounded by the energy of the perturbation E, as |q|/c < E^2/c^2. We show that the Wilson line/EE correlator deep i…
Many proposed quantum mechanical models of black holes include highly nonlocal interactions. The time required for thermalization to occur in such models should reflect the relaxation times associated with classical black holes in general relativity. Moreover, the time required for a particularly strong form of thermalization to occur, sometimes known as scrambling, determines the time scale on which black holes should start to release information. It has been conjectured that black holes scramble in a time logarithmic in their entropy, and that no system in nature can scramble faster. In this…
Out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) can be used to probe how quickly a quantum system scrambles information when the initial conditions of the dynamics are changed. In sufficiently large quantum systems, one can extract from the OTOC the quantum analog of the Lyapunov coefficient that describes the time scale on which a classical chaotic system becomes scrambled. OTOCs have been applied only to a very limited number of toy models, such as the SYK model connected with black hole information scrambling, but they could find much wider applicability for information scrambling in quantum systems …
We study the scrambling of quantum information in local random unitary circuits by focusing on the tripartite information proposed by Hosur et al. We provide exact results for the averaged Rényi-$2$ tripartite information in two cases: (i) the local gates are Haar random and (ii) the local gates are dual-unitary and randomly sampled from a single-site Haar-invariant measure. We show that the latter case defines a one-parameter family of circuits, and prove that for a "maximally chaotic" subset of this family quantum information is scrambled faster than in the Haar-random case. Our approach is …
Two seemingly distinct notions regarding black holes have captured the imagination of theoretical physicists over the past decade: First, black holes are conjectured to be fast scramblers of information, a notion that is further supported through connections to quantum chaos and decay of mutual information via AdS/CFT holography. Second, black hole information paradox has motivated exotic quantum structure near horizons of black holes (e.g., gravastars, fuzzballs, or firewalls) that may manifest themselves through delayed gravitational wave echoes in the aftermath of black hole formation or me…
We compute the mutual information between finite intervals in two non-compact 2d CFTs in the thermofield double formulation after one of them has been locally perturbed by a primary operator at some time $t_ω$ in the large $c$ limit. We determine the time scale, called the scrambling time, at which the mutual information vanishes and the original entanglement between the thermofield double gets destroyed by the perturbation. We provide a holographic description in terms of a free falling particle in the eternal BTZ black hole that exactly matches our CFT calculations. Our results hold for any …
Topological Control of Quantum Chaos Diagnostics: OTOCs, Spectral Statistics, and Information Scrambling in Ising Model
School of Quantum Physics and Matter Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（量子物理与物质学院，基础科学研究院（IPM））；Ershad Damavand, Institute of Higher Education (EDI)（厄尔沙德达马万德高等教育研究所（EDI））；Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Amirkabir University of Technology（阿米尔卡比尔理工大学数学与计算机科学系）；Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Mathematical Sciences, Alzahra University（阿尔扎哈拉大学数学科学学院数学系）；Department of Physics, CT.C, Islamic Azad University（伊斯兰阿扎德大学CT.C物理学系）；Institute of Biosocial and Quantum Science and Technologies, CT.C, Islamic Azad University（伊斯兰阿扎德大学CT.C生物社会与量子科学与技术研究所）
In this paper we investigate measures of chaos and entanglement in rational conformal field theories in 1+1 dimensions. First, we derive a universal formula for the late time value of the out-of-time-ordered correlators for this class of theories. Our universal result can be expressed as a particular combination of the modular S-matrix elements known as the anyon monodromy scalar. Next, in the explicit setup of a $SU(N)_k$ Wess-Zumino-Witten model, we compare the late time behavior of the out-of-time-ordered correlators and the purity. Interestingly, in the large-c limit, the purity grows loga…
The fine grained energy spectrum of quantum chaotic systems is widely believed to be described by random matrix statistics. A basic scale in such a system is the energy range over which this behavior persists. We define the corresponding time scale by the time at which the linearly growing ramp region in the spectral form factor begins. We call this time $t_{\rm ramp}$. The purpose of this paper is to study this scale in many-body quantum systems that display strong chaos, sometimes called scrambling systems. We focus on randomly coupled qubit systems, both local and $k$-local (all-to-all inte…
We consider a holographic model of the heating up process. As a dual background we take a geometry describing thin shell accretion on a black brane. We find explicitly the time evolution of the mutual information during the non-equlibrium heating process from the initial temperature $T_i$ to the final temperature $T_f$ for the system of two intervals in the 1+1 dimensional case. We calculate widths and separation of twointervals for which the time dependence of the mutual information has the bell-like form, i.e. it starts from zero value at the wake up time, then reaches a maximal value and va…
One way to diagnose chaos in bipartite unitary channels is via the tripartite information of the corresponding Choi state, which for certain choices of the subsystems reduces to the negative conditional mutual information (CMI). We study this quantity from a quantum information-theoretic perspective to clarify its role in diagnosing scrambling. When the CMI is zero, we find that the channel has a special normal form consisting of local channels between individual inputs and outputs. However, we find that arbitrarily low CMI does not imply arbitrary proximity to a channel of this form, although…
In the current manuscript we perform a systematic investigation about the effects of nonlocal interaction to the spread of quantum information in many body system. In particular, we have studied how nonlocality influence the existing bound on the growth rate of the commutator involving two local operators, the butterfly velocity. For this purpose, we consider the nonlocal theory on the worldvolume of $N\gg 1$, NS$5$ branes arising in the limit of vanishing string coupling, the `little string theory'. A direct evidence of nonlocality can be realized from the `volume law' behavior for the most d…
In this work, we investigate the quantum chaos in various $T\bar{T}$-deformed SYK models with finite $N$, including the SYK$_4$, the supersymmetric SYK$_4$, and the SYK$_2$ models. We numerically study the evolution of the spectral form factor (SFF), the out-of-time ordered correlator (OTOC), and the Krylov complexity. We find that the characteristic evolution of the SFF, OTOC and K-complexity of both the SYK$_4$ and SSYK$_4$ models remains unchanged under the deformation, which implies that the properties of quantum chaos is preserved. We also identify a many-body localization behavior in the…
Recent studies of out-of-time ordered thermal correlation functions (OTOC) in holographic systems and in solvable models such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model have yielded new insights into manifestations of many-body chaos. So far the chaotic behavior has been obtained through explicit calculations in specific models. In this paper we propose a unified description of the exponential growth and ballistic butterfly spreading of OTOCs across different systems using a newly formulated "quantum hydrodynamics," which is valid at finite $\hbar$ and to all orders in derivatives. The scrambling of…
We study the time-dependence of Hawking radiation for a black hole in the Unruh vacuum, and find that it is not robust against certain UV and IR effects. If there is a UV cutoff at the Planck scale, Hawking radiation is turned off after the scrambling time. In the absence of a UV cutoff, Hawking radiation is sensitive to the IR cutoff through a UV/IR connection due to higher-derivative interactions in the effective theory. Furthermore, higher-derivative interactions with the background contribute to a large amplitude of particle creation that changes Hawking radiation. This unexpected large ef…
Following the Membrane Paradigm, we show that the stretched horizon of a black hole retains information about particles thrown into the hole for a time of order the scrambling time m ln(m/M_P), after the particles cross the horizon. One can, for example, read off the proper time at which a particle anti-particle pair thrown into the hole, annihilates behind the horizon, if this time is less than the scrambling time. If we believe that the Schwarzschild geometry exterior to the horizon is a robust thermodynamic feature of the quantum black hole, independent of whether it is newly formed, or has…
Quantum scrambling plays an important role in understanding thermalization in closed quantum systems. By this effect, quantum information spreads throughout the system and becomes hidden in the form of non-local correlations. Alternatively, it can be described in terms of the increase in complexity and spatial support of operators in the Heisenberg picture, a phenomenon known as operator growth. In this work, we study the disordered fully-connected Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, and we demonstrate that scrambling is absent for disorder-averaged expectation values of observables. In detail, we …
For an effective field theory in the background of an evaporating black hole with spherical symmetry, we consider non-renormalizable interactions and their relevance to physical effects. The background geometry is determined by the semi-classical Einstein equation for an uneventful horizon where the vacuum energy-momentum tensor is small for freely falling observers. Surprisingly, after Hawking radiation appears, the transition amplitude from the Unruh vacuum to certain multi-particle states grows exponentially with time for a class of higher-derivative operators after the collapsing matter en…
We apply the transformation of mixing azimuthal and internal coordinate or mixing time and internal coordinate to a stack of N black M-branes to find the Melvin spacetime of a stack of N black D-branes with magnetic or electric flux in string theory, after the Kaluza-Klein reduction. We slightly extend previous formulas to investigate the external magnetic and electric effects on the butterfly effect and holographic mutual information. It shows that the Melvin fields do not modify the scrambling time and will enhance the mutual information. In addition, we also T-dualize and twist a stack of N…
Scrambling and thermalisation are topics of intense study in both condensed matter and high energy physics. Random unitary dynamics form a simple testing-ground for our theoretical understanding of these processes. In this work, we derive exact expressions for the large $q$ limiting behaviour of a selection of $n$-point correlation functions, out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), and their moments. In the process we find a general principle that breaks OTOCs into small and easy to calculate pieces, and which can likely be deployed in a more general context.
The newly proposed island formula for entanglement entropy of Hawking radiation is applied to spherically symmetric 4-dimensional eternal Kaluza-Klein (KK) black hole. The "charge" $Q$ of KK black holes quantifies its deviation from Schwarzschild black holes. The impact of $Q$ on the island is studied at late times. The late-time island, whose boundary is located outside but within a Planckian distance of the horizon, is slightly extended by $Q$. While the no-island entropy grows linearly, the late-time entanglement entropy is given by island configuration with twice the Bekenstein-Hawking ent…
Recently introduced reparametrization mode operators in CFTs have been shown to govern stress tensor interactions $via$ the shadow operator formalism and seem to govern the effective dynamics of chaotic systems. We initiate a study of Ward identities of reparametrization mode operators $i.e.$ how two dimensional CFT Ward identities govern the behaviour of insertions of reparametrization modes $ε$ in correlation functions: $\langleεεϕϕ\rangle$. We find that in the semi-classical limit of large $c$ they dictate the leading $\mathcal{O}(c^{-1})$ behaviour. While for the $4$pt function this reprod…
The role played by the mutual information of subsystems on the Page curve is explored in this paper. With the total system consisting of the black hole and radiation, together with the inclusion of island, we observe that the vanishing of mutual information between $B_+$ and $B_-$ which in turn means the disconnected phase of the entanglement wedge corresponding to $B_+\cup B_-$, yields a time scale of the order of scrambling time. This results in a time independent expression for the fine grained entropy of Hawking radiation consistent with the correct Page curve. We also find corrections to …
We study chaotic dynamics in two-dimensional conformal field theory through out-of-time order thermal correlators of the form $\langle W(t)VW(t)V\rangle$. We reproduce bulk calculations similar to those of [1], by studying the large $c$ Virasoro identity block. The contribution of this block to the above correlation function begins to decrease exponentially after a delay of $\sim t_* - \fracβ{2π}\log β^2E_w E_v$, where $t_*$ is the scrambling time $\fracβ{2π}\log c$, and $E_w,E_v$ are the energy scales of the $W,V$ operators.
