Fine-grained quantum chaos and effective field theory of scrambling in CFTs

Felix Haehl of the University of British Columbia will give the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics (SITP) Monday Colloquium.

He will describe an effective field theory for stress tensor exchanges in two-dimensional conformal field theories with a large central charge. The theory has a structure that is similar to the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model at low energies. Felix will discuss the gauge symmetries of the model and how they relate to the Lyapunov behaviour of certain correlators. Using this Lorentzian effective field theory, one can readily calculate the out-of-time-order correlators diagnosing quantum chaos. In this context he will also discuss certain higher-point functions, which quantify chaos at a more fine-grained level. He will comment on potential future applications of the effective theory to real-time thermal physics and conformal field theory.