Physics

Prof. Arul Laxminarayan
IIT Madras

Abstract:

The butterfly effect is a metaphor for the extreme sensitivity of nonlinear chaotic systems found generically when there is 
more than 1-degree of freedom, examples abound from the gravitational three-body problem to the weather. Chaos and quantum physics have had
an uneasy relationship which has implications in explorations of the no-man's land of classical-quantum boundaries and goes to the heart of the foundations of statistical physics. The talk will introduce surprising connections of classical chaos to quantum entanglement and  implications therein to many-body localization and thermalization of isolated systems.  Recent proposals of measuring quantum chaos, such as out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC) and scrambling will be discussed briefly as they bring us to the latest avatar of the butterfly effect which seems to have reached black holes, now conjectured to be nature's most chaotic and fastest scramblers.