Journal of High Energy Physics (Oct 2024)

Scramblon loops

  • Douglas Stanford,
  • Shreya Vardhan,
  • Shunyu Yao

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP10(2024)073
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2024, no. 10
pp. 1 – 32

Abstract

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Abstract In large N chaotic quantum systems, the butterfly effect is mediated by a collective field mode known as the “scramblon.” We study self-interactions of the scramblon in variants of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. In spatially extended versions of the model and for large spatial separation, fluctuations described by loop diagrams can invalidate the single-scramblon approximation well before its contribution to out-of-time-order correlators becomes of order one. We find a qualitative difference between an incoherent regime at high temperaure (or in a Brownian version of the model) and a coherent regime at low temperature.

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