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Effective Field Theory for Chaotic CFTs

High Energy Physics - Theory 2018-10-22 v3 Statistical Mechanics Chaotic Dynamics Quantum Physics

Abstract

We derive an effective field theory for general chaotic two-dimensional conformal field theories with a large central charge. The theory is a specific and calculable instance of a more general framework recently proposed in [1]. We discuss the gauge symmetries of the model and how they relate to the Lyapunov behaviour of certain correlators. We calculate the out-of-time-ordered correlators diagnosing quantum chaos, as well as certain more fine-grained higher-point generalizations, using our Lorentzian effective field theory. We comment on potential future applications of the effective theory to real-time thermal physics and conformal field theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.02898,
  title  = {Effective Field Theory for Chaotic CFTs},
  author = {Felix M. Haehl and Moshe Rozali},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.02898},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

33 pages, 4 figures; v2: minor improvements, added paragraph on higher spin exchanges; v3: minor improvements, added reference, published version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:28:13.770Z