Thermal out-of-time-order correlators, KMS relations, and spectral functions

• Main Authors: Felix M. Haehl, R. Loganayagam, Prithvi Narayan, Amin A. Nizami, Mukund Rangamani
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2017-12-01
• Series: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Subjects: Quantum Dissipative Systems; Stochastic Processes; AdS-CFT Correspondence; Thermal Field Theory
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/JHEP12(2017)154

Abstract We describe general features of thermal correlation functions in quantum systems, with specific focus on the fluctuation-dissipation type relations implied by the KMS condition. These end up relating correlation functions with different time ordering and thus should naturally be viewed in the larger context of out-of-time-ordered (OTO) observables. In particular, eschewing the standard formulation of KMS relations where thermal periodicity is combined with time-reversal to stay within the purview of Schwinger-Keldysh functional integrals, we show that there is a natural way to phrase them directly in terms of OTO correlators. We use these observations to construct a natural causal basis for thermal n-point functions in terms of fully nested commutators. We provide several general results which can be inferred from cyclic orbits of permutations, and exemplify the abstract results using a quantum oscillator as an explicit example.