The operator Lévy flight: light cones in chaotic long-range interacting systems

We propose a generic light cone phase diagram for chaotic long-range r−α interacting systems, where a linear light cone appears for α≥d+1/2 in d dimension. Utilizing the dephasing nature of quantum chaos, we argue that the universal behavior of the squared commutator is described by a stochastic model, for which the exact phase diagram is known. We provide an interpretation in terms of the Lévy flights and show that this suffices to capture the scaling of the squared commutator. We verify these phenomena in numerical computation of a long-range spin chain with up to 200 sites.