Information Scrambling with Higher-Form Fields

Abstract

The late time behaviour of OTOCs involving generic non-conserved local operators show exponential decay in chaotic many body systems. However, it has been recently observed that for certain holographic theories, the OTOC involving the $U(1)$ conserved current for a gauge field instead varies diffusively at late times. The present work generalizes this observation to conserved currents corresponding to higher-form symmetries that belong to a wider class of symmetries known as generalized symmetries. We started by computing the late time behaviour of OTOCs involving $U(1)$ current operators in five dimensional AdS-Schwarzschild black hole geometry for the 2-form antisymmetric $B$-fields. The bulk solution for the $B$-field exhibits logarithmic divergences near the asymptotic AdS boundary which can be regularized by introducing a double trace deformation in the boundary CFT. Finally, we consider the more general case with antisymmetric $p$-form fields in arbitrary dimensions. In the scattering approach, the boundary OTOC can be written as an inner product between asymptotic 'in' and 'out' states which in our case is equivalent to computing the inner product between two bulk fields with and without a shockwave background. We observe that the late time OTOCs have power law tails which seems to be a universal feature of the higher-form fields with $U(1)$ charge conservation.