Light-Cone Spreading of Perturbations and the Butterfly Effect in a Classical Spin Chain

• Published in: Physical review letters Vol. 121; no. 2; p. 024101
• Main Authors: Das, Avijit, Chakrabarty, Saurish, Dhar, Abhishek, Kundu, Anupam, Huse, David A, Moessner, Roderich, Ray, Samriddhi Sankar, Bhattacharjee, Subhro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 13.07.2018

We find that the effects of a localized perturbation in a chaotic classical many-body system-the classical Heisenberg chain at infinite temperature-spread ballistically with a finite speed even when the local spin dynamics is diffusive. We study two complementary aspects of this butterfly effect: th...