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arXiv:2012.13172 · Physical Review A

Information scrambling and chaos in open quantum systems

Paolo Zanardi A, Namit Anand

Published Jun 15, 2021• 75 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) have been extensively used over the past few years to study information scrambling and quantum chaos in many-body systems. In this paper, we extend the formalism of the averaged bipartite OTOC of Styliaris et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 030601 (2021)] to the case of open quantum systems. The dynamics is no longer unitary but it is described by more general quantum channels (trace preserving, completely positive maps). This ``open bipartite OTOC'' can be treated in an exact analytical fashion and is shown to amount to a distance between two quantum channels. Moreover, our analytical form unveils competing entropic contributions from information scrambling and environmental decoherence such that the latter can obfuscate the former. To elucidate this subtle interplay, we analytically study special classes of quantum channels, namely, dephasing channels, entanglement-breaking channels, and others. Finally, as a physical application we numerically study dissipative many-body spin chains and show how the competing entropic effects can be used to differentiate between integrable and chaotic regimes.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.103.062214

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Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) have been extensively used over the past few years to study information scrambling and quantum chaos in many-body systems. In this paper, we extend the formalism of the averaged bipartite OTOC of Styliaris et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 030601 (2021)] to the case of open quantum systems. The dynamics is no longer unitary but it is described by more general quantum channels (trace preserving, completely positive maps). This ``open bipartite OTOC'' can be treated in an exact analytical fashion and is shown to amount to a distance between two quantum channels. Moreover, our analytical form unveils competing entropic contributions from information scrambling and environmental decoherence such that the latter can obfuscate the former. To elucidate this subtle interplay, we analytically study special classes of quantum channels, namely, dephasing channels, entanglement-breaking channels, and others. Finally, as a physical application we numerically study dissipative many-body spin chains and show how the competing entropic effects can be used to differentiate between integrable and chaotic regimes.
In recent years, the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) has emerged as a diagnostic tool for information scrambling in quantum many-body systems. Here, we present exact analytical results for the OTOC for a typical pair of random local operators supported over two regions of a bipartition. Quite remarkably, we show that this "bipartite OTOC" is equal to the operator entanglement of the evolution, and we determine its interplay with entangling power. Furthermore, we compute long-time averages of the OTOC and reveal their connection with eigenstate entanglement. For Hamiltonian systems, we uncover a hierarchy of constraints over the structure of the spectrum and elucidate how this affects the equilibration value of the OTOC. Finally, we provide operational significance to this bipartite OTOC by unraveling intimate connections with average entropy production and scrambling of information at the level of quantum channels.
Abstract The field of information scrambling has seen significant growth over the last decade, where the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) has emerged as a prominent tool to probe it. In this work, we use bipartite OTOC, a particular form of OTOC, to study information scrambling in the atom–field interaction models and the model of the Ising spin chain interacting with a tilted magnetic field. This is done considering the effects of open quantum systems. A relationship between information scrambling, using bipartite OTOC, and irreversibility, using entropy production, is probed under unitary dynamics. The equivalence of bipartite OTOC with operator entanglement is explicitly shown for the Ising model.
A closed quantum system never forgets its initial state, but the encoded information can get scrambled and become inaccessible without measuring a large fraction of all the system degrees of freedom. This scrambling can be diagnosed by studying the spatial spreading of initially local operators under the Heisenberg time evolution, and the decay of the out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC). What insights can OTOCs provide to understand the dynamics of quantum many-body systems? What are the characteristic behaviors of OTOCs during the time evolution? How is information scrambling affected by the dissipation in open quantum many-body systems? We first study slow scrambling in many-body localized systems via calculating various correlators, two-point retarded correlators and OTOCs. Comparing with retarded correlators, OTOCs provide more information about the dynamics. We find that disorder slows and partially halts the onset of information scrambling. Instead of ballistic spreading, propagation of information forms a logarithmic light cone. Next, we study the finite-size scaling of OTOCs at late times in generic thermalizing quantum many-body systems. When energy is conserved, the late-time saturation value of the OTOC of generic traceless local operators scales as an inverse polynomial in the system size. This is in contrast to the inverse exponential scaling expected for chaotic dynamics without energy conservation. We also study information scrambling in open quantum many-body systems. We define a dissipative version of OTOC and study its behaviors in a prototypical chaotic quantum chain with dissipation. We find that dissipation leads to not only the overall decay of the scrambled information due to leaking, but also structural changes so that the information light cone can only reach a finite distance even when the effect of overall decay is removed. Finally, we construct a family of local Hamiltonians for understanding the asymmetric information scrambling. Our models live on a one-dimensional lattice and exhibit asymmetric butterfly light cone between the left and right spatial directions.
Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) provide a powerful probe of quantum chaos and scrambling. While the Lindblad formalism is often used to describe OTOCs in open systems, microscopic mechanisms that give rise to the Lindblad equation at the level of time-ordered correlation functions do not necessarily justify this approach at the level of OTOCs. Starting from a microscopic model of a subsystem coupled to a random bath, we show that the resulting OTOC dynamics contains an additional contribution compared to the standard Lindblad approach. This contribution, induced by correlations between different replicas, allows key properties of the underlying unitary dynamics such as long-time freeness to be retained and information scrambling to be captured more faithfully. As an application, we show that this extended formalism can be used to numerically study OTOCs in large closed systems by replacing part of the system with a dissipative boundary, offering a way to study operator spreading and higher-order correlations beyond directly accessible system sizes.
Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) have emerged as a diagnostic of information scrambling and quantum chaos in many-body systems. We investigate the imprints of chaos in the dynamics of OTOCs in the Heisenberg spin-1/21/21/2 chain with random fields. The system is parameterized to exhibit a crossover from integrable to chaotic dynamics. We demonstrate numerically that the approach to saturation of the OTOC can distinguish between integrable and chaotic regimes, with a power-law (1/t)(1/t)(1/t) relaxation for integrable systems and a higher-degree power-law decay (1/tα;α≥1)(1/t^α; α\ge 1)(1/tα;α≥1) followed by an exponential relaxation for the chaotic regime. We further show that long-range spectral statistics, such as the number variance, are more effective in characterizing quantum chaos in the regime near saturation of OTOC. We also demonstrate that the relaxation and initial scrambling regimes exhibit distinct and universal features, with the former being sensitive and the latter being robust against different realizations of random-fields. The long-time saturation of OTOC also fluctuates with different realizations, and its exact expression is derived through the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis.
Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) have been extensively studied in recent years as a diagnostic of quantum information scrambling. In this paper, we study quantum information-theoretic aspects of the regularized finite-temperature OTOC. We introduce analytical results for the bipartite regularized OTOC (BROTOC): the regularized OTOC averaged over random unitaries supported over a bipartition. We show that the BROTOC has several interesting properties, for example, it quantifies the purity of the associated thermofield double state and the operator purity of the analytically continued time-evolution operator. At infinite-temperature, it reduces to one minus the operator entanglement of the time-evolution operator. In the zero-temperature limit and for nondegenerate Hamiltonians, the BROTOC probes the groundstate entanglement. By computing long-time averages, we show that the equilibration value of the BROTOC is intimately related to eigenstate entanglement. Finally, we numerically study the equilibration value of the BROTOC for various physically relevant Hamiltonian models and comment on its ability to distinguish integrable and chaotic dynamics.