| Summary: | Abstract We study the contour dependence of the out-of-time-ordered correlation function (OTOC) both in weakly coupled field theory and in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. We show that its value, including its Lyapunov spectrum, depends sensitively on the shape of the complex time contour in generic weakly coupled field theories. For gapless theories with no thermal mass, such as SYK, the Lyapunov spectrum turns out to be an exception; their Lyapunov spectra do not exhibit contour dependence, though the full OTOCs do. Our result puts into question which of the Lyapunov exponents computed from the exponential growth of the OTOC reflects the actual physical dynamics of the system. We argue that, in a weakly coupled Φ4 theory, a kinetic theory argument indicates that the symmetric configuration of the time contour, namely the one for which the bound on chaos has been proven, has a proper interpretation in terms of dynamical chaos. Finally, we point out that a relation between these OTOCs and a quantity which may be measured experimentally — the Loschmidt echo — also suggests a symmetric contour configuration, with the subtlety that the inverse periodicity in Euclidean time is half the physical temperature. In this interpretation the chaos bound reads λ ≤ 2 π β = π T physical $$ \uplambda \le \frac{2\pi }{\beta }=\pi {T}_{\mathrm{physical}} $$ .
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