Bounds on chaos from the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis

Chaitanya Murthy, Mark Srednicki

Published 2019-06-26Version 1

We show that known bounds on the growth rates of operator complexity and the out-of-time-order four-point correlator in chaotic many-body quantum systems follow directly from the general structure of operator matrix elements in systems that obey the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. This ties together two key paradigms of thermal behavior in isolated many-body quantum systems.