Extremal chaos

Abstract

Abstract In maximally chaotic quantum systems, a class of out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) saturate the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford (MSS) bound on chaos. Recently, it has been shown that the same OTOCs must also obey an infinite set of (subleading) constraints in any thermal quantum system with a large number of degrees of freedom. In this paper, we find a unique analytic extension of the maximally chaotic OTOC that saturates all the subleading chaos bounds which allow saturation. This extremally chaotic OTOC has the feature that information of the initial perturbation is recovered at very late times. Furthermore, we argue that the extremally chaotic OTOC provides a Källen-Lehmann-type representation for all OTOCs. This representation enables the identification of all analytic completions of maximal chaos as small deformations of extremal chaos in a precise way.