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Unscrambling the physics of out-of-time-order correlators

Nature Physics volume 14, pages 988–990 (2018)Cite this article

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Quantitative tools for measuring the propagation of information through quantum many-body systems, originally developed to study quantum chaos, have recently found many new applications from black holes to disordered spin systems.

Suppose we had such exquisite control over a quantum many-body system that we could run time forwards and backwards while keeping the system well isolated. What features of quantum dynamics could we probe with such a quantum time machine? Recently, driven by theoretical developments in quantum matter and quantum gravity, many new responses to this question have emerged. These answers led to new insights into quantum chaos, the black hole information problem, thermalization and non-classicality in many-body physics, and bounds on quantum dynamics. Central to these developments is the concept of an out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC).

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Fig. 1: Schematic of the growth of operators with time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Condensed Matter Theory Center, Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics, Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, and Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Brian Swingle

  2. Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Brian Swingle

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Correspondence to Brian Swingle.

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Swingle, B. Unscrambling the physics of out-of-time-order correlators. Nature Phys 14, 988–990 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0295-5

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