Fast scrambling in the Hyperbolic Ising model

Abstract We investigate many-body chaos and scrambling in the Hyperbolic Ising model, a mixed-field Ising model living in the background of $$AdS_{2}$$ A d S 2 . The effect of the curvature is captured by site-dependent couplings obtained from the $$AdS_2$$ A d S 2 metric applied to a flat nearest-neighbor spin chain. Using a combination of out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), Krylov complexity, and spectral statistics, we present consistent evidence that this model exhibits faster scrambling behavior relative to its flat counterpart. In particular, we observe signatures consistent with fast scrambling dynamics emerging from purely local interactions. At the system sizes accessible to tensor network simulations, the OTOCs display short-lived exponential growth regimes, from which we extract effective Lyapunov exponents. These effective finite-size exponents exhibit a temperature dependence broadly compatible with the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford (MSS) bound within numerical uncertainty. Our results indicate that increasing spatial curvature can significantly decrease scrambling time in systems with only nearest-neighbor interactions, providing a minimal and computationally accessible platform for studying quantum chaos. This makes the model a promising test-bed for exploring scrambling and operator growth in near-term quantum simulation architectures.