English

Two-dimensional conformal field theory and the butterfly effect

High Energy Physics - Theory 2016-07-07 v3

Abstract

We study chaotic dynamics in two-dimensional conformal field theory through out-of-time order thermal correlators of the form W(t)VW(t)V\langle W(t)VW(t)V\rangle. We reproduce bulk calculations similar to those of [1], by studying the large cc Virasoro identity block. The contribution of this block to the above correlation function begins to decrease exponentially after a delay of tβ2πlogβ2EwEv\sim t_* - \frac{\beta}{2\pi}\log \beta^2E_w E_v, where tt_* is the scrambling time β2πlogc\frac{\beta}{2\pi}\log c, and Ew,EvE_w,E_v are the energy scales of the W,VW,V operators.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1412.5123,
  title  = {Two-dimensional conformal field theory and the butterfly effect},
  author = {Daniel A. Roberts and Douglas Stanford},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.5123},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

v1: 14 pages plus appendices, 2 figures. v2: references updated and minor changes to the text. v3: minor error corrected in Appendix B, but the conclusion is unchanged

R2 v1 2026-06-22T07:33:53.051Z