Many proposed quantum mechanical models of black holes include highly nonlocal interactions. The time required for thermalization to occur in such models should reflect the relaxation times associated with classical black holes in general relativity. Moreover, the time required for a particularly strong form of thermalization to occur, sometimes known as scrambling, determines the time scale on which black holes should start to release information. It has been conjectured that black holes scramble in a time logarithmic in their entropy, and that no system in nature can scramble faster. In this article, we address the conjecture from two directions. First, we exhibit two examples of systems that do indeed scramble in logarithmic time: Brownian quantum circuits and the antiferromagnetic Ising model on a sparse random graph. Unfortunately, both fail to be truly ideal fast scramblers for reasons we discuss. Second, we use Lieb-Robinson techniques to prove a logarithmic lower bound on the scrambling time of systems with finite norm terms in their Hamiltonian. The bound holds in spite of any nonlocal structure in the Hamiltonian, which might permit every degree of freedom to interact directly with every other one.
Asplund, Berenstein and Trancanelli @cite_30 have numerically investigated relaxation in matrix models. Their approach is to look at the classical dynamics of the system, with initial states selected stochastically in such a way as to enforce the uncertainty principle. They do indeed find what appears to be very rapid relaxation of the system to an attractor state, but their article only considers a fixed-sized and relatively small system, so it cannot directly address the scaling of relaxation time with system size. The relationship between this classical relaxation time and quantum mechanical scrambling is also an interesting and currently unexplored question.
@cite_30
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We report on a numerical simulation of the classical evolution of the plane-wave matrix model with semiclassical initial conditions. Some of these initial conditions thermalize and are dual to a black hole forming from the collision of D-branes in the plane-wave geometry. In particular, we consider a large fuzzy sphere (a D2-brane) plus a single eigenvalue (a D0 particle) going exactly through the center of the fuzzy sphere and aimed to intersect it. Including quantum fluctuations of the off-diagonal modes in the initial conditions, with sufficient kinetic energy the configuration collapses to a small size. We also find evidence for fast thermalization: rapidly decaying autocorrelation functions at late times with respect to the natural time scale of the system.