Moving Mirrors, OTOCs and Scrambling

Abstract

We explore the physics of scrambling in the moving mirror models, in which a two-dimensional CFT is subjected to a time-dependent boundary condition. It is well-known that by choosing an appropriate mirror profile, one can model quantum aspects of black holes in two-dimensions, ranging from Hawking radiation in an eternal black hole (for an "escaping mirror") to the recent realization of Page curve in evaporating black holes (for a "kink mirror"). We explore a class of OTOCs in the presence of such a boundary and explicitly demonstrate the following primary aspects: First, we show that the dynamical CFT data directly affect an OTOC and maximally chaotic scrambling occurs for the escaping mirror for a large-$c$ CFT with identity block dominance. We further show that the exponential growth of OTOC associated with the physics of scrambling yields a power-law growth in the model for evaporating black holes which demonstrates a unitary dynamics in terms of a Page curve. We also demonstrate that, by tuning a parameter, one can naturally interpolate between an exponential growth associated to scrambling and a power-law growth in unitary dynamics. Our work explicitly exhibits the role of higher-point functions in CFT dynamics as well as the distinction between scrambling and Page curve. We also discuss several future possibilities based on this class of models.