The Cosmological OTOC: Formulating new cosmological micro-canonical correlation functions for random chaotic fluctuations in Out-of-Equilibrium Quantum Statistical Field Theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel formalism to compute the cosmological out-of-time-ordered correlation function (OTOC) during inflation and reheating, enabling the study of quantum chaos and correlations in early universe cosmology.

Contribution

It formulates the first method to calculate cosmological OTOC during stochastic inflation, linking quantum chaos with cosmological dynamics and proposing bounds on late-time universe temperature.

Findings

Exponential decay of cosmological OTOC indicates quantum chaos.

Derived a lower bound on late-time universe temperature based on Lyapunov spectrum.

Classical limit analysis confirms consistency with expected large-time behavior.

Abstract

The out-of-time-ordered correlation (OTOC) function is an important new probe in quantum field theory which is treated as a significant measure of random quantum correlations. In this paper, with the slogan "Cosmology meets Condensed Matter Physics" we demonstrate a formalism using which for the first time we compute the Cosmological OTOC during the stochastic particle production during inflation and reheating following canonical quantization technique. In this computation, two dynamical time scales are involved, out of them at one time scale the cosmological perturbation variable and for the other the canonically conjugate momentum is defined, which is the strict requirement to define time scale separated quantum operators for OTOC and perfectly consistent with the general definition of OTOC. Most importantly, using the present formalism not only one can study the quantum correlation during stochastic inflation and reheating, but also study quantum correlation for any random events in Cosmology. Next, using the late time exponential decay of cosmological OTOC with respect to the dynamical time scale of our universe which is associated with the canonically conjugate momentum operator in this formalism we study the phenomena of quantum chaos by computing the expression for {\it Lyapunov spectrum}. Further, using the well known Maldacena Shenker Stanford (MSS) bound, on Lyapunov exponent, $\lambda\leq 2\pi/\beta$, we propose a lower bound on the equilibrium temperature, $T=1/\beta$, at the very late time scale of the universe. On the other hand, with respect to the other time scale with which the perturbation variable is associated, we find decreasing but not exponentially decaying behaviour, which quantifies the random correlation at out-of-equilibrium. Finally, we have studied the classical limit of the OTOC to check the consistency with the large time limiting behaviour.