A bound on energy dependence of chaos

TL;DR

This paper proposes a universal chaos energy bound, suggesting the Lyapunov exponent's growth with energy is limited to linear, which aligns with known quantum chaos bounds and has implications for fundamental physics.

Contribution

It introduces a conjecture that bounds the energy dependence of chaos in classical and quantum systems, extending the understanding of chaos limits.

Findings

The chaos energy bound is consistent with known classical and quantum chaos bounds.

Arguments are provided supporting the conjecture for chaotic billiards and multi-particle systems.

The bound may impose fundamental constraints on physical systems and the universe.

Abstract

We conjecture a chaos energy bound, an upper bound on the energy dependence of the Lyapunov exponent for any classical/quantum Hamiltonian mechanics and field theories. The conjecture states that the Lyapunov exponent $\lambda(E)$ grows no faster than linearly in the total energy $E$ in the high energy limit. In other words, the exponent $c$ in $\lambda(E) \propto E^c \,(E\to\infty)$ satisfies $c\leq 1$. This chaos energy bound stems from thermodynamic consistency of out-of-time-order correlators (OTOC's) and applies to any classical/quantum system with finite $N$ / large $N$ ($N$ is the number of degrees of freedom) under plausible physical conditions on the Hamiltonians. To the best of our knowledge the chaos energy bound is satisfied by any classically chaotic Hamiltonian system known, and is consistent with the cerebrated chaos bound by Maldacena, Shenker and Stanford which is for quantum cases at large $N$. We provide arguments supporting the conjecture for generic classically chaotic billiards and multi-particle systems. The existence of the chaos energy bound may put a fundamental constraint on physical systems and the universe.