Concentration of OTOC and Lieb-Robinson velocity in random Hamiltonians

The commutator between operators at different space and time has been a diagnostic for locality of unitary evolution. Most existing results are either for specific tractable (random) Hamiltonians(Out-of-Time-Order-Correlators calculations), or for worse case Hamiltonians (Lieb-Robinson-like bounds or OTOC bounds). In this work, we study commutators in typical Hamiltonians. Draw a sample from any zero-mean bounded independent random Hamiltonian ensemble, time-independent or Brownian, we formulate concentration bounds in the spectral norm and for the OTOC with arbitrary non-random state. Our bounds hold with high probability and scale with the sum of interactions squared. Our Brownian bounds are compatible with the Brownian limit while deterministic operator growth bounds must diverge. We evaluate this general framework on short-ranged, 1d power-law interacting, and SYK-like k-local systems and the results match existing lower bounds and conjectures. Our main probabilistic argument employs a robust matrix martingale technique called uniform smoothness and may be applicable in other settings.