The delocalization or scrambling of quantum information has emerged as a central ingredient in the understanding of thermalization in isolated quantum many-body systems. Recently, significant progress has been made analytically by modeling non-integrable systems as periodically driven systems, lacking a Hamiltonian picture, while honest Hamiltonian dynamics are frequently limited to small system sizes due to computational constraints. In this paper, we address this by investigating the role of conservation laws (including energy conservation) in the thermalization process from an information-theoretic perspective. For general non-integrable models, we use the equilibrium approximation to show that the maximal amount of information is scrambled (as measured by the tripartite mutual information of the time-evolution operator) at late times even when a system conserves energy. In contrast, we explicate how when a system has additional symmetries that lead to degeneracies in the spectrum, the amount of information scrambled must decrease. This general theory is exemplified in case studies of holographic conformal field theories (CFTs) and the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. Due to the large Virasoro symmetry in 1+1D CFTs, we argue that, in a sense, these holographic theories are not maximally chaotic, which is explicitly seen by the non-saturation of the second Rényi tripartite mutual information. The roles of particle-hole and U(1) symmetries in the SYK model are milder due to the degeneracies being only two-fold, which we confirm explicitly at both large- and small-N. We reinterpret the operator entanglement in terms of the growth of local operators, connecting our results with the information scrambling described by out-of-time-ordered correlators, identifying the mechanism for suppressed scrambling from the Heisenberg perspective.
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Scattering strings off quantum extremal surfaces
A bstract We consider a Hayden & Preskill like setup for both maximally chaotic and sub-maximally chaotic quantum field theories. We act on the vacuum with an operator in a Rindler like wedge R and transfer a small subregion I of R to the other wedge. The chaotic scrambling dynamics of the QFT Rindler time evolution reveals the information in the other wedge. The holographic dual of this process involves a particle excitation falling into the bulk and crossing into the entanglement wedge of the complement to r = R\I . With the goal of studying the locality of the emergent holographic theory we compute various quantum information measures on the boundary that tell us when the particle has entered this entanglement wedge. In a maximally chaotic theory, these measures indicate a sharp transition where the particle enters the wedge exactly when the insertion is null separated from the quantum extremal surface for r . For sub-maximally chaotic theories, we find a smoothed crossover at a delayed time given in terms of the smaller Lyapunov exponent and dependent on the time-smearing scale of the probe excitation. The information quantities that we consider include the full vacuum modular energy R\I as well as the fidelity between the state with the particle and the state without. Along the way, we find a new explicit formula for the modular Hamiltonian of two intervals in an arbitrary 1+1 dimensional CFT to leading order in the small cross ratio limit. We also give an explicit calculation of the Regge limit of the modular flowed chaos correlator and find examples which do not saturate the modular chaos bound. Finally, we discuss the extent to which our results reveal properties of the target of the probe excitation as a “stringy quantum extremal surface” or simply quantify the probe itself thus giving a new approach to studying the notion of longitudinal string spreading.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1911298
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10411159
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of High Energy Physics
- Volume:
- 2022
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 1029-8479
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2022)143
