Critical quenches, OTOCs and early-time chaos

Abstract

In this article, we explore dynamical aspects of Out-of-Time-Order correlators (OTOCs) for critical quenches, in which an initial non-trivial state evolves with a CFT-Hamiltonian. At sufficiently large time, global critical quenches exhibit a universal thermal-behavior in terms of low-point correlators. We demonstrate that, under such a quench, OTOCs demarcate chaotic CFTs from integrable CFTs by exhibiting a characteristic exponential Lyapunov growth for the former. Upon perturbatively introducing inhomogeneity to the global quench, we further argue and demonstrate with examples that, such a perturbation parameter can induce a parametrically large scrambling time, even for a CFT with an order one central charge. This feature may be relevant in designing measurement protocols for non-trivial OTOCs, in general. Both our global and inhomogeneous quench results bode well for an upper bound on the corresponding Lyapunov exponent, that may hold outside thermal equilibrium.