Event Details

The growth of commutators of initially commuting local operators diagnoses the onset of chaos in quantum many-body systems. I will discuss the onset of scrambling in a few different examples of many-body quantum systems. I will argue that in all of these examples, chaos spreads in a ballistic fashion with a butterfly velocity that acts as a speed limit for the propagation of quantum information even though transport is diffusive. I will also comment on various interesting and universal aspects of the growth (Lyapunov) exponent and the butterfly velocity for these systems.