Thermalization and chaos in QED3

We study the real time dynamics of NF flavors of fermions coupled to a U(1) gauge field in 2+1 dimensions to leading order in a 1/NF expansion. For large enough NF, this is an interacting conformal field theory and describes the low energy properties of the Dirac spin liquid. We focus on thermalization and the onset of many-body quantum chaos which can be diagnosed from the growth of initally anti-commuting fermion field operators. We compute such anti-commutators in this gauge theory to leading order in 1/NF. We find that the anti-commutator grows exponentially in time and compute the quantum Lyapunov exponent. We briefly comment on chaos, locality, and gauge invariance.