Probing quantum chaos near a wormhole throat with a circular string
Abstract
We investigate whether quantum fluctuations of a circular probe string develop a quantum-chaotic response while traversing a wormhole throat. The classical circular-string embedding is periodic and radially stable, but its two physical transverse polarizations experience time-dependent tidal potentials. Expanding the world-sheet action to quadratic order, we canonically quantize these modes and construct out-of-time-ordered correlator(OTOC) amplitudes from their unequal-time commutators. For the Ellis--Bronnikov wormhole, both polarizations exhibit finite intervals of approximately exponential OTOC growth associated with the first throat passage. The corresponding dimensionless rate measured with respect to physical time is positive over the parameter range studied and generally decreases as the probe energy is increased relative to the throat scale. In the global-monopole extension, increasing the solid-angle deficit narrows the band of locally amplifiable modes and suppresses the extracted rates; a sufficiently strong defect can nearly quench the radial signal, while the angular channel retains a polarization-dependent non-monotonic structure when the energy-to-throat-scale ratio is small. These quantities characterize finite-time dynamical sensitivity in the Gaussian fluctuation sector and should not be identified with asymptotic many-body chaos or a thermodynamic phase transition. Although the numerical analysis uses two representative wormhole geometries, the construction depends only on covariant world-sheet fluctuations and real-time commutators. It therefore provides a transferable, non-holographic framework for applying quantum-chaos diagnostics directly to quantum probes in curved spacetimes.
Related
- Chaotic particle dynamics near a traversable wormhole throat
- Chaotic particle dynamics near a traversable wormhole throat
- Scalar halos and conical matching for finite-width vortices at a wormhole throat
- An exact Kerr-like rotating Morris--Thorne wormhole: throat, ergoregion and equatorial shadow slice
- Gravitational lensing outside and inside of a marginally unstable photon sphere at a Z2-symmetric wormhole throat in strong deflection limits
BibTeX
@misc{li2026probing,
title = {{Probing quantum chaos near a wormhole throat with a circular string}},
author = {Ai-chen Li and Xin-Fei Li and Xuanting Ji},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.09613},
eprint = {2609.09613},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09613},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Probing quantum chaos near a wormhole throat with a circular string
AU - Ai-chen Li
AU - Xin-Fei Li
AU - Xuanting Ji
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/22
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.09613
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09613
AB - We investigate whether quantum fluctuations of a circular probe string develop a quantum-chaotic response while traversing a wormhole throat. The classical circular-string embedding is periodic and radially stable, but its two physical transverse polarizations experience time-dependent tidal potentials. Expanding the world-sheet action to quadratic order, we canonically quantize these modes and construct out-of-time-ordered correlator(OTOC) amplitudes from their unequal-time commutators. For the Ellis--Bronnikov wormhole, both polarizations exhibit finite intervals of approximately exponential OTOC growth associated with the first throat passage. The corresponding dimensionless rate measured with respect to physical time is positive over the parameter range studied and generally decreases as the probe energy is increased relative to the throat scale. In the global-monopole extension, increasing the solid-angle deficit narrows the band of locally amplifiable modes and suppresses the extracted rates; a sufficiently strong defect can nearly quench the radial signal, while the angular channel retains a polarization-dependent non-monotonic structure when the energy-to-throat-scale ratio is small. These quantities characterize finite-time dynamical sensitivity in the Gaussian fluctuation sector and should not be identified with asymptotic many-body chaos or a thermodynamic phase transition. Although the numerical analysis uses two representative wormhole geometries, the construction depends only on covariant world-sheet fluctuations and real-time commutators. It therefore provides a transferable, non-holographic framework for applying quantum-chaos diagnostics directly to quantum probes in curved spacetimes.
ER -