  We investigate various geometrical aspects of the notion of `optical depth'
in the thermal atmosphere of black hole horizons. Optical depth has been
proposed as a measure of fast-crambling times in such black hole systems, and
the associated optical metric suggests that classical chaos plays a leading
role in the actual scrambling mechanism. We study the behavior of the optical
depth with the size of the system and find that AdS/CFT phase transitions with
topology change occur naturally as the scrambler becomes smaller than its
thermal length. In the context of detailed AdS/CFT models based on D-branes,
T-duality implies that small scramblers are described in terms of matrix
quantum mechanics.
