Chaos and relative entropy

Abstract

One characteristic feature of a chaotic system is the quick delocalization of quantum information (fast scrambling). One therefore expects that in such a system a state quickly becomes locally indistinguishable from its perturbations. In this paper we study the time dependence of the relative entropy between the reduced density matrices of the thermofield double state and its perturbations in two dimensional conformal field theories. We show that in a CFT with a gravity dual, this relative entropy exponentially decays until the scrambling time. This decay is not uniform. We argue that the early time exponent is universal while the late time exponent is sensitive to the butterfly effect. This large c answer breaks down at the scrambling time, therefore we also study the relative entropy in a class of spin chain models numerically. We find a similar universal exponential decay at early times, while at later times we observe that the relative entropy has large revivals in integrable models, whereas there are no revivals in non-integrable models.