A detailed numerical study reveals that the asymptotic values of the standard deviation-to-mean ratio of the out-of-time-ordered correlator can be successfully used as a measure of the quantum chaoticity of the system. We employ a finite-size fully connected quantum system with two degrees of freedom, namely the algebraic u(3) model, and demonstrate a clear correspondence between the relative oscillations of the correlators and the ratio of the chaotic part of the volume of phase space in the classical limit of the system. We also show how the relative oscillations scale with the system size and conjecture that the scaling exponent can also serve as a robust chaos indicator.
This letter reports the findings of the late time behavior of the out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) via a quantum kicked rotor model with $\cal{PT}$-symmetric driving potential. An analytical expression of the OTOCs' quadratic growth with time is yielded as $C(t)=G(K)t^2$. Interestingly, the growth rate $G$ features a quantized response to the increase of the kick strength $K$, which indicates the chaos-assisted quantization in the OTOCs' dynamics. The physics behind this is the quantized absorption of energy from the non-Hermitian driving potential. This discovery and the ensuing establ…
While classical chaos has been successfully characterized with consistent theories and intuitive techniques, such as with the use of Lyapunov exponents, quantum chaos is still poorly understood, as well as its relation with multi-partite entanglement and information scrambling. We consider a benchmark system, the kicked top model, which displays chaotic behaviour in the classical version, and proceed to characterize the quantum case with a thorough diagnosis of the growth of chaos and entanglement in time. As a novel tool for the characterization of quantum chaos, we introduce for this scope t…
Two properties are needed for a classical system to be chaotic: exponential stretching and mixing. Recently, out-of-time order correlators were proposed as a measure of chaos in a wide range of physical systems. While most of the attention has previously been devoted to the short time stretching aspect of chaos, characterized by the Lyapunov exponent, we show for quantum maps that the out-of-time correlator approaches its stationary value exponentially with a rate determined by the Ruelle-Pollicot resonances. This property constitutes clear evidence of the dual role of the underlying classical…
We investigate signatures of chaos and equilibration in the quantum Rabi model, which exhibits a quantum phase transition when the ratio of the atomic level-splitting to bosonic frequency grows to infinity. We show that out-of-time-order correlator derived from the Loschmidt echo signal quickly saturates in the normal phase and reveals exponential growth in the superradiant phase which is associated with the onset of quantum chaos. Furthermore, we show that the effective time-averaged dimension of the quantum Rabi system can be large compared to the spin system size which leads to suppression …
Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) are an effective tool in characterizing black hole chaos, many-body thermalization and quantum dynamics instability. Previous research findings have shown that the OTOCs' exponential growth (EG) marks the limit for quantum systems. However, we report in this letter a periodically-modulated nonlinear Schrödinger system, in which we interestingly find a novel way of information scrambling: super-EG. We show that the quantum OTOCs' growth, which stems from the quantum chaotic dynamics, will increase in a super-exponential way. We also find that in the class…
The out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC), recently analyzed in several physical contexts, is studied for low-dimensional chaotic systems through semiclassical expansions and numerical simulations. The semiclassical expansion for the OTOC yields a leading-order contribution in $\hbar^2$ that is exponentially increasing with time within an intermediate, temperature-dependent, time-window. The growth-rate in such a regime is governed by the Lyapunov exponent of the underlying classical system and scales with the square-root of the temperature.
Out-of time-ordered correlators (OTOC) have recently attracted significant attention from the physics of many-body systems, to quantum black-holes, with an exponential growth of the OTOC indicating quantum chaos. Here we consider OTOC in the context of coined discrete quantum walks, a very well studied model of quantization of classical random walks with applications to quantum algorithms. Three separate cases of operators, variously localized in the coin and walker spaces, are discussed in this context and it is found that the approximated behavior of the OTOCs is well described by simple alg…
We investigate the onset of chaos in a periodically kicked Dicke model (KDM), using the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) as a diagnostic tool, in both the oscillator and the spin subspaces. In the large spin limit, the classical Hamiltonian map is constructed, which allows us to investigate the corresponding phase space dynamics and to compute the Lyapunov exponent. We show that the growth rate of the OTOC for the canonically conjugate coordinates of the oscillator is able to capture the Lyapunov exponent in the chaotic regime. The onset of chaos is further investigated using the saturation…
We study numerically and analytically the time dependence and saturation of out-of-time ordered correlators (OTOC) in chaotic few-body quantum-mechanical systems: quantum Henon-Heiles system (weakly chaotic), BMN matrix quantum mechanics (strongly chaotic) and Gaussian random matrix ensembles. The growth pattern of quantum-mechanical OTOC is complex and nonuniversal, with no clear exponential regime at relevant timescales in any of the examples studied (which is not in contradiction to the exponential growth found in the literature for many-body systems, i.e. fields). On the other hand, the pl…
Out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) have been proposed as a probe of chaos in quantum mechanics, on the basis of their short-time exponential growth found in some particular set-ups. However, it has been seen that this behavior is not universal. Therefore, we query other quantum chaos manifestations arising from the OTOCs and we thus study their long-time behavior in systems of completely different nature: quantum maps, which are the simplest chaotic one-body system and spin chains, which are many-body systems without a classical limit. It is shown that studying the long-time regime of the O…
We provide a detailed examination of a thermal out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) growing exponentially in time in systems without chaos. The system is a one-dimensional quantum mechanics with a potential whose part is an inverted harmonic oscillator. We numerically observe the exponential growth of the OTOC when the temperature is higher than a certain threshold. The Lyapunov exponent is found to be of the order of the classical Lyapunov exponent generated at the hilltop, and it remains non-vanishing even at high temperature. We adopt various shape of the potential and find these features un…
Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC) are a quantifier of quantum information scrambling and quantum chaos. We propose an efficient quantum algorithm to measure OTOCs that provides an exponential speed-up over the best known classical algorithm provided the OTOC operator to be estimated admits an efficient gate decomposition. We also discuss a scheme to obtain information about the eigenvalue spectrum and the spectral density of OTOCs.
We propose a Wigner function based parameter that can be used as an indicator of quantum chaos. This parameter is defined as "entropy" from the time-dependence of "non-classicallity" proposed in \cite{KZ04}. We perform our considerations for the system of damped nonlinear (Kerr-like) oscillator excited by a series of ultra-short external pulses.
We discuss a system of a nonlinear Kerr-like oscillator externally pumped by ultra-short, external, coherent pulses. For such a system, we analyse the application of the Kullback-Leibler quantum divergence $K[ρ||σ]$ to the detection of quantum chaotic behaviour. Defining linear and nonlinear quantum divergences, and calculating their power spectra, we show that these parameters are more suitable indicators of quantum chaos than the fidelity commonly discussed in the literature, and are useful for dealing with short time series. Moreover, the nonlinear divergence is more sensitive to chaotic ba…
The out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) have been proposed and widely used recently as a tool to define and describe many-body quantum chaos. Here, we develop the Keldysh non-linear sigma model technique to calculate these correlators in interacting disordered metals. In particular, we focus on the regularized and unregularized OTOCs, defined as $Tr[\sqrtρ A(t) \sqrtρ A^\dagger(t)]$ and $Tr[ρA(t)A^\dagger(t)]$ respectively (where $A(t)$ is the anti-commutator of fermion field operators and $ρ$ is the thermal density matrix). The calculation of the rate of OTOCs' exponential growth is remin…
It was proposed recently that the out-of-time-ordered four-point correlator (OTOC) may serve as a useful characteristic of quantum-chaotic behavior, because in the semi-classical limit, $\hbar \to 0$, its rate of exponential growth resembles the classical Lyapunov exponent. Here, we calculate the four-point correlator, $C(t)$, for the classical and quantum kicked rotor -- a textbook driven chaotic system -- and compare its growth rate at initial times with the standard definition of the classical Lyapunov exponent. Using both quantum and classical arguments, we show that the OTOC's growth rate…
Chaotic dynamics in quantum many-body systems scrambles local information so that at late times it can no longer be accessed locally. This is reflected quantitatively in the out-of-time-ordered correlator of local operators, which is expected to decay to zero with time. However, for systems of finite size, out-of-time-ordered correlators do not decay exactly to zero and in this paper we show that the residual value can provide useful insights into the chaotic dynamics. When energy is conserved, the late-time saturation value of the out-of-time-ordered correlator of generic traceless local oper…
We argue that two distinct probes of quantum chaos, i.e., the growth of noncommutativity of two unequal-time operators and the degree of irreversibility in a time-reversal test, are equivalent for initially localized states. We confirm this for interacting nonintegrable many-body systems and a quantum kicked rotor. Our results show that three-point out-of-time-ordered correlators dominate the growth of the squared commutator for initially localized states, in stark contrast to four-point out-of-time-ordered correlators that have extensively been studied for thermal initial states.
Recent work has connected the type of fidelity decay in perturbed quantum models to the presence of chaos in the associated classical models. We demonstrate that a system's rate of fidelity decay under repeated perturbations may be measured efficiently on a quantum information processor, and analyze the conditions under which this indicator is a reliable probe of quantum chaos and related statistical properties of the unperturbed system. The type and rate of the decay are not dependent on the eigenvalue statistics of the unperturbed system, but depend on the system's eigenvector statistics in …
We demonstrate analytically and verify numerically that the out-of-time order correlator is given by the thermal average of Loschmidt echo signals. This provides a direct link between the out-of-time-order correlator -- a recently suggested measure of information scrambling in quantum chaotic systems -- and the Loschmidt echo, a well-appreciated familiar diagnostic that captures the dynamical aspect of chaotic behavior in the time domain, and is accessible to experimental studies.
In this paper we investigate measures of chaos and entanglement in rational conformal field theories in 1+1 dimensions. First, we derive a universal formula for the late time value of the out-of-time-ordered correlators for this class of theories. Our universal result can be expressed as a particular combination of the modular S-matrix elements known as the anyon monodromy scalar. Next, in the explicit setup of a $SU(N)_k$ Wess-Zumino-Witten model, we compare the late time behavior of the out-of-time-ordered correlators and the purity. Interestingly, in the large-c limit, the purity grows loga…
The Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) implies a form for the matrix elements of local operators between eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, expected to be valid for chaotic systems. Another signal of chaos is a positive Lyapunov exponent, defined on the basis of Loschmidt echo or out-of-time-order correlators. For this exponent to be positive, correlations between matrix elements unrelated by symmetry, usually neglected, have to exist. The same is true for the peak of the dynamic heterogeneity length, relevant for systems with slow dynamics. These correlations, as well as those between el…
In a previous paper (C. Cafaro et al., 2012), we compared an uncorrelated 3D Gaussian statistical model to an uncorrelated 2D Gaussian statistical model obtained from the former model by introducing a constraint that resembles the quantum mechanical canonical minimum uncertainty relation. Analysis was completed by way of the information geometry and the entropic dynamics of each system. This analysis revealed that the chaoticity of the 2D Gaussian statistical model, quantified by means of the Information Geometric Entropy (IGE), is softened or weakened with respect to the chaoticity of the 3D …
We study the relationship between quantum chaos and pseudorandomness by developing probes of unitary design. A natural probe of randomness is the "frame potential," which is minimized by unitary $k$-designs and measures the $2$-norm distance between the Haar random unitary ensemble and another ensemble. A natural probe of quantum chaos is out-of-time-order (OTO) four-point correlation functions. We show that the norm squared of a generalization of out-of-time-order $2k$-point correlators is proportional to the $k$th frame potential, providing a quantitative connection between chaos and pseudor…
We study real-time local correlators $\langle\mathcal{O}(\mathbf{x},t)\mathcal{O}(0,0)\rangle$ in chaotic quantum many-body systems. These correlators show universal structure at late times, determined by the dominant operator-space Feynman trajectories for the evolving operator $\mathcal{O}(\mathbf{x},t)$. The relevant trajectories involve the operator contracting to a point at both the initial and final time and so are structurally different from those dominating the out-of-time-order correlator. In the absence of conservation laws, correlations decay exponentially: $\langle\mathcal{O}(\math…
The quantum-to-classical correspondence is often quantified in dynamics by a quantity referred to as the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC). In chaotic systems, the OTOC is expected to grow exponentially at early time, characteristic of a Lyapunov exponent, however, exponential growth can also occur for integrable systems. Here we investigate the OTOC for realistic diatomic molecular potentials in one degree of freedom, finding that the OTOC can grow exponentially near the dissociation energy of the moelcule. Further, this dynamics is tied to the classical dynamics of the atoms at the outer c…
As noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processors increase in size and complexity, their use as general purpose quantum simulators will rely on algorithms based on the Trotter-Suzuki expansion. We run quantum simulations on a small, highly accurate quantum processor, and show how one can optimize simulation accuracy by balancing algorithmic (Trotter) errors against native errors specific to the quantum hardware at hand. We further study the interplay between native errors, Trotter errors, and the emergence of chaos as seen in measurements of a time averaged fidelity-out-of-time-ordered-cor…
The out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) is central to the understanding of information scrambling in quantum many-body systems. In this work, we show that the OTOC in a quantum many-body system close to its critical point obeys dynamical scaling laws which are specified by a few universal critical exponents of the quantum critical point. Such scaling laws of the OTOC imply a universal form for the butterfly velocity of a chaotic system in the quantum critical region and allow one to locate the quantum critical point and extract all universal critical exponents of the quantum phase transition…
We derive an effective field theory for general chaotic two-dimensional conformal field theories with a large central charge. The theory is a specific and calculable instance of a more general framework recently proposed in [1]. We discuss the gauge symmetries of the model and how they relate to the Lyapunov behaviour of certain correlators. We calculate the out-of-time-ordered correlators diagnosing quantum chaos, as well as certain more fine-grained higher-point generalizations, using our Lorentzian effective field theory. We comment on potential future applications of the effective theory t…
The out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) is a measure of quantum chaos that is being vigorously investigated. Analytically accessible simple models that have long been studied in other contexts could provide insights into such measures. This paper investigates the OTOC in the quantum bakers map which is the quantum version of a simple and exactly solvable model of deterministic chaos that caricatures the action of kneading dough. Exact solutions based on the semiquantum approximation are derived that tracks very well the correlators till the Ehrenfest time. The growth occurs at the exponentia…
Out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) have been proposed as sensitive probes for chaos in interacting quantum systems. They exhibit a characteristic classical exponential growth, but saturate beyond the so-called scrambling or Ehrenfest time $τ_{\rm E}$ in the quantum correlated regime. Here we present a path-integral approach for the entire time evolution of OTOCs for bosonic $N$-particle systems. We first show how the growth of OTOCs up to $τ_{\rm E} = (1/λ) \log N$ is related to the Lyapunov exponent $λ$ of the corresponding chaotic mean-field dynamics in the semiclassical large-$N$ limit. …
We study chaos and scrambling in unitary channels by considering their entanglement properties as states. Using out-of-time-order correlation functions to diagnose chaos, we characterize the ability of a channel to process quantum information. We show that the generic decay of such correlators implies that any input subsystem must have near vanishing mutual information with almost all partitions of the output. Additionally, we propose the negativity of the tripartite information of the channel as a general diagnostic of scrambling. This measures the delocalization of information and is closely…
Exponential growth of thermal out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) is an indicator of a possible gravity dual, and a simple toy quantum model showing the growth is being looked for. We consider a system of two harmonic oscillators coupled nonlinearly with each other, and numerically observe that the thermal OTOC grows exponentially in time. The system is well-known to be classically chaotic, and is a reduction of Yang-Mills-Higgs theory. The exponential growth is certified because the growth exponent (quantum Lyapunov exponent) of the thermal OTOC is well matched with the classical Lyapunov exp…
The out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) is considered as a measure of quantum chaos. We formulate how to calculate the OTOC for quantum mechanics with a general Hamiltonian. We demonstrate explicit calculations of OTOCs for a harmonic oscillator, a particle in a one-dimensional box, a circle billiard and stadium billiards. For the first two cases, OTOCs are periodic in time because of their commensurable energy spectra. For the circle and stadium billiards, they are not recursive but saturate to constant values which are linear in temperature. Although the stadium billiard is a typical example…
Two topics, evolving rapidly in separate fields, were combined recently: The out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) signals quantum-information scrambling in many-body systems. The Kirkwood-Dirac (KD) quasiprobability represents operators in quantum optics. The OTOC has been shown to equal a moment of a summed quasiprobability. That quasiprobability, we argue, is an extension of the KD distribution. We explore the quasiprobability's structure from experimental, numerical, and theoretical perspectives. First, we simplify and analyze the weak-measurement and interference protocols for measuring t…
We study quantum chaos of rotating BTZ black holes in Topologically Massive gravity (TMG). We discuss the relationship between chaos parameters including Lyapunov exponents and butterfly velocities from shock wave calculations of out-of-time-order correlators (OTOC) and from pole-skipping analysis. We find a partial match between pole-skipping and the OTOC results in the high temperature regime. We also find that the velocity bound puts a chaos constraint on the gravitational Chern-Simons coupling.
The idea of the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) has recently emerged in the study of both condensed matter systems and gravitational systems. It not only plays a key role in investigating the holographic duality between a strongly interacting quantum system and a gravitational system, but also diagnoses the chaotic behavior of many-body quantum systems and characterizes the information scrambling. Based on the OTOCs, three different concepts -- quantum chaos, holographic duality, and information scrambling -- are found to be intimately related to each other. Despite of its theoretical impo…
It is believed that the two-dimensional (2D) Anderson model exhibits localization for any nonzero disorder in the thermodynamic limit and it is also well known that the finite-size effects are considerable in the weak disorder limit. Here we numerically study the quantum-chaos to localization transition in the finite 2D Anderson model using standard indicators used in the modern literature such as the level spacing ratio, spectral form factor, variances of observable matrix elements, participation entropy and the eigenstate entanglement entropy. We show that many features of these indicators m…
This article tackles a fundamental long-standing problem in quantum chaos, namely, whether quantum chaotic systems can exhibit sensitivity to initial conditions, in a form that directly generalizes the notion of classical chaos in phase space. We develop a linear response theory for complexity, and demonstrate that the complexity can exhibit exponential sensitivity in response to perturbations of initial conditions for chaotic systems. Two immediate significant results follows: i) the complexity linear response matrix gives rise to a spectrum that fully recovers the Lyapunov exponents in the c…
