In my talk, I will discuss the recently-discovered phenomenon of pole-skipping in thermal correlators of energy and momentum operators. In the presence of low-energy hydrodynamic modes, pole-skipping provides a precise relation between hydrodynamics and the underlying microscopic quantum chaos, as diagnosed by an out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC). In the absence of hydrodynamics, as for example in a 1+1 dimensional quantum critical theory (a conformal field theory), pole-skipping can still be used to compute the rate of the exponential growth of the OTOC.

* Sašo Grozdanov, MIT