English

Operator growth in 2d CFT

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-01-05 v2 Statistical Mechanics Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

We investigate and characterize the dynamics of operator growth in irrational two-dimensional conformal field theories. By employing the oscillator realization of the Virasoro algebra and CFT states, we systematically implement the Lanczos algorithm and evaluate the Krylov complexity of simple operators (primaries and the stress tensor) under a unitary evolution protocol. Evolution of primary operators proceeds as a flow into the 'bath of descendants' of the Verma module. These descendants are labeled by integer partitions and have a one-to-one map to Young diagrams. This relationship allows us to rigorously formulate operator growth as paths spreading along the Young's lattice. We extract quantitative features of these paths and also identify the one that saturates the conjectured upper bound on operator growth.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.10519,
  title  = {Operator growth in 2d CFT},
  author = {Pawel Caputa and Shouvik Datta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.10519},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

48 pages, 7 figures. v2: minor clarifications added, added fig. 4.1 and typos corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:02:38.229Z