Out-of-time-order operators and the butterfly effect

DOI10.1016/J.AOP.2018.07.020zbMATH Open1398.81105arXiv1704.02979OpenAlexW3104099696WikidataQ129429887 ScholiaQ129429887MaRDI QIDQ1798043FDOQ1798043

Authors: Jordan S. Cotler, Geoffrey R. Penington, Da-Wei Ding 

Publication date: 23 October 2018

Published in: Annals of Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Out-of-time-order (OTO) operators have recently become popular diagnostics of quantum chaos in many-body systems. The usual way they are introduced is via a quantization of classical Lyapunov growth, which measures the divergence of classical trajectories in phase space due to the butterfly effect. However, it is not obvious how exactly they capture the sensitivity of a quantum system to its initial conditions beyond the classical limit. In this paper, we analyze sensitivity to initial conditions in the quantum regime by recasting OTO operators for many-body systems using various formulations of quantum mechanics. Notably, we utilize the Wigner phase space formulation to derive an $hbar$-expansion of the OTO operator for spatial degrees of freedom, and a large spin $1/s$-expansion for spin degrees of freedom. We find in each case that the leading term is the Lyapunov growth for the classical limit of the system and argue that quantum corrections become dominant at around the scrambling time, which is also when we expect the OTO operator to saturate. We also express the OTO operator in terms of propagators and see from a different point of view how it is a quantum generalization of the divergence of classical trajectories.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02979

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zbMATH Keywords

semiclassical approximationquantum chaosphase spacescramblingout-of-time-ordered correlators

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Phase-space methods including Wigner distributions, etc. applied to problems in quantum mechanics (81S30) Many-body theory; quantum Hall effect (81V70) Quantum chaos (81Q50)

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Cited In (6)

• Spread complexity in saddle-dominated scrambling
• Tunable quantum chaos in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model coupled to a thermal bath
• Out of time order correlation of the Hubbard model with random local disorder
• Probing chaos in the spherical \(p\)-spin glass model
• Wigner current in multidimensional quantum billiards
• Krylov complexity in saddle-dominated scrambling

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