Scrambling power of soft photons

Abstract

Abstract Observable scattering processes entail emission-absorption of soft photons. As these degrees of freedom go undetected, some information is lost. Whether some of this information can be recovered in the observation of the hard particles, depends of the actual pattern of the scrambling of information. We compute the information scrambling of electron and soft photon scattering by the tripartite mutual information in terms of the 2-Renyi entropy, and find a finite amount of scrambling is present. We show that scrambling is a byproduct of decoherence achieved by the scattering system in its interaction with the environment, due to the emission-absorption of soft photons in fully unitary processes.