Probing Out-of-Time-Order Correlators
High Energy Physics - Theory
2020-01-08 v6 Statistical Mechanics
Quantum Physics
Abstract
We present a method to probe the Out-of-Time-Order Correlators (OTOCs) of a general system by coupling it to a harmonic oscillator probe. When the system's degrees of freedom are traced out, the OTOCs imprint themselves on the generalized influence functional of the oscillator. This generalized influence functional leads to a local effective action for the probe whose couplings encode OTOCs of the system. We study the structural features of this effective action and the constraints on the couplings from microscopic unitarity. We comment on how the OTOCs of the system appear in the OTOCs of the probe.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1807.09731,
title = {Probing Out-of-Time-Order Correlators},
author = {Soumyadeep Chaudhuri and R. Loganayagam},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.09731},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
14 pages+appendices, minor changes