Effective Field Theory for Chaotic CFTs

TL;DR

This paper develops an effective field theory for chaotic 2D conformal field theories with large central charge, enabling calculation of chaos diagnostics like out-of-time-ordered correlators.

Contribution

It introduces a specific, calculable effective field theory framework for chaotic CFTs, linking gauge symmetries to quantum chaos measures.

Findings

Derived an effective field theory for chaotic 2D CFTs

Calculated out-of-time-ordered correlators using the theory

Linked gauge symmetries to Lyapunov behavior

Abstract

We derive an effective field theory for general chaotic two-dimensional conformal field theories with a large central charge. The theory is a specific and calculable instance of a more general framework recently proposed in [1]. We discuss the gauge symmetries of the model and how they relate to the Lyapunov behaviour of certain correlators. We calculate the out-of-time-ordered correlators diagnosing quantum chaos, as well as certain more fine-grained higher-point generalizations, using our Lorentzian effective field theory. We comment on potential future applications of the effective theory to real-time thermal physics and conformal field theory.