RG Flows with Global Symmetry Breaking and Bounds from Chaos

We discuss general aspects of renormalization group (RG) flows between two conformal fixed points in 4d with a broken continuous global symmetry in the UV. Every such RG flow can be described in terms of the dynamics of Nambu-Goldstone bosons of broken conformal and global symmetries. We derive the low-energy effective action that describes this class of RG flows from basic symmetry principles. We view the theory of Nambu-Goldstone bosons as a theory in anti-de Sitter space with the flat space limit. This enables an equivalent CFT₃ formulation of these 4d RG flows in terms of spectral deformations of a generalized free CFT₃. We utilize this dual description to impose further constraints on the low energy effective action associated with unitary RG flows in 4d by invoking the chaos bound in 3d. This approach naturally provides a set of independent monotonically decreasing C-functions for 4d RG flows with global symmetry breaking by explicitly relating 4d C-functions with certain out-of-time-order correlators that diagnose chaos in 3d. We also comment on a more general connection between RG and chaos in QFT.