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Lieb-Robinson Bound and the Butterfly Effect in Quantum Field Theories

Journal Article · · Physical Review Letters
 [1];  [2]
  1. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States). Center for Theoretical Physics and Dept. of Physics; MIT
  2. Stanford Univ., CA (United States). Inst. for Theoretical Physics and Dept. of Physics
As experiments are increasingly able to probe the quantum dynamics of systems with many degrees of freedom, it is interesting to probe fundamental bounds on the dynamics of quantum information. We elaborate on the relationship between one such bound—the Lieb-Robinson bound—and the butterfly effect in strongly coupled quantum systems. The butterfly effect implies the ballistic growth of local operators in time, which can be quantified with the “butterfly” velocity vB. Similarly, the Lieb-Robinson velocity places a state-independent ballistic upper bound on the size of time evolved operators in nonrelativistic lattice models. Here, we argue that v B is a state-dependent effective Lieb-Robinson velocity. We study the butterfly velocity in a wide variety of quantum field theories using holography and compare with free-particle computations to understand the role of strong coupling. We find that v B remains constant or decreases with decreasing temperature. We also comment on experimental prospects and on the relationship between the butterfly velocity and signaling.
Research Organization:
Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0012567
OSTI ID:
1505740
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1328616
Journal Information:
Physical Review Letters, Journal Name: Physical Review Letters Journal Issue: 9 Vol. 117; ISSN 0031-9007; ISSN PRLTAO
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Operator Spreading in Random Unitary Circuits journal April 2018
Translationally Invariant Non-Fermi-Liquid Metals with Critical Fermi Surfaces: Solvable Models journal July 2018
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Slow Relaxation and Diffusion in Holographic Quantum Critical Phases text January 2019
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Measurement of many-body chaos using a quantum clock text January 2016
Slow scrambling in disordered quantum systems text January 2016
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Butterfly Velocity in Quadratic Gravity text January 2018
Emergent statistical mechanics of entanglement in random unitary circuits text January 2018
Entropic uncertainty relations for quantum information scrambling text January 2018
Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlator Quasiprobabilities Robustly Witness Scrambling text January 2018
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Out-of-time-ordered correlator in the quantum bakers map and truncated unitary matrices text January 2018
Rate of cluster decomposition via Fermat-Steiner point text January 2018
Quantum Scrambling and State Dependence of the Butterfly Velocity text January 2018
Out-of-time-ordered correlation functions in open systems: A Feynman-Vernon influence functional approach text January 2019
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