Onset of many-body chaos in the $O(N)$ model

Abstract: The growth of commutators of initially commuting local operators diagnoses the onset of chaos in quantum many-body systems. We compute such commutators of local field operators with $N$ components in the $(2+1)$-dimensional $O(N)$ nonlinear sigma model to leading order in $1/N$. The system is taken to be in thermal equilibrium at a temperature $T$ above the zero temperature quantum critical point separating the symmetry broken and unbroken phases. The commutator grows exponentially in time with a rate denoted $\lambda_L$. At large $N$ the growth of chaos as measured by $\lambda_L$ is slow because the model is weakly interacting, and we find $\lambda_L \approx 3.2 T/N$. The scaling with temperature is dictated by conformal invariance of the underlying quantum critical point. We also show that operators grow ballistically in space with a "butterfly velocity" given by $v_B/c \approx 1$ where $c$ is the Lorentz-invariant speed of particle excitations in the system. We briefly comment on the behavior of $\lambda_L$ and $v_B$ in the neighboring symmetry broken and unbroken phases.