In weakly monitored quantum systems, traditional diagnostics of operator spreading such as out-of-time-ordered-correlators and Lieb-Robinson bounds can break down, as entanglement can spread at seemingly unbounded velocity. This has the adverse effect of making integrable and chaotic quantum dynamics appear identical. However, as the authors show here, the humble quantity of global operator entanglement remains a reliable metric of chaoticity in these systems. They elucidate this by studying entanglement phase transitions in a local, non-Hermitian transverse-field Ising model under the lens of operator and quenched entanglement dynamics.
In weakly monitored quantum systems, traditional diagnostics of operator spreading such as out-of-time-ordered-correlators and Lieb-Robinson bounds can break down, as entanglement can spread at seemingly unbounded velocity. This has the adverse effect of making integrable and chaotic quantum dynamics appear identical. However, as the authors show here, the humble quantity of global operator entanglement remains a reliable metric of chaoticity in these systems. They elucidate this by studying entanglement phase transitions in a local, non-Hermitian transverse-field Ising model under the lens of operator and quenched entanglement dynamics.
Out-of-time order correlators (OTOCs) are crucial tools for studying quantum chaos as they show distinct scrambling behavior for chaotic Hamiltonians. We calculate the OTOC and analyze the quantum information scrambling in atom-field and spin-spin interaction models, which are open-system models and exhibit non-Markovian behavior. We also examine the Loschmidt echo for these models and comment on their chaotic nature. The commutator growth of two local operators, which is upper bounded by the Lieb-Robinson bound, is studied for these models, and the patterns of scrambling are investigated.
Understanding the spread of quantum entanglement and scrambling of information across a quantum many-body system is a fundamental problem in quantum dynamics. A necessary part of the spread of the entanglement is the growth in time of Heisenberg operators of initially localized operators. This operator growth can be diagnosed by studying the space-time structure of commutators of well-separated operators. Previous studies in this area focused on translation invariant models, but the effects of disorder, which can radically alter the motion of heat and charge, had not been studied. Here, the authors study the growth of operators in interacting systems with quenched disorder. In the localized phase, they find that operator sizes grow logarithmically in time similar to other measures of entanglement spreading. In the disordered metal, they find that operator sizes grow linearly with time, i.e., ballistically, in contrast to the diffusive motion of charge and heat. The ballistic growth of operators is quantified by the butterfly velocity which the authors relate to the charge diffusion constant and the interaction-induced inelastic scattering rate. When the diffusion of charge is slow, the resulting butterfly velocity is much smaller than the maximum speed allowed by microscopic causality constraints.
Time New Roman 10 We investigate signatures of quantum chaos within Ising spin chains subjected to transverse and longitudinal fields, incorporating both local (nearest-neighbor) and non-local (long-range) couplings. While local Ising models may exhibit integrable or chaotic dynamics contingent on interaction strengths and field parameters, systems with non-local interactions generally display a stronger propensity toward chaos, even when the non-local couplings are weak. By examining the distribution of energy level spacings through the level spacing ratio, we delineate the transition from integrable to chaotic regimes and characterize the emergence of quantum chaos in these systems. Our analysis demonstrates that non-local couplings facilitate faster operator spreading and more intricate dynamical behavior, enabling these systems to approach maximal chaos more readily than their local counterparts. Additionally, we analyze Krylov complexity as a dynamical probe of chaos, observing a characteristic peak followed by a plateau at late times in chaotic regimes. This behavior provides a quantitative means to distinguish between integrable and chaotic phases, with the growth rate and saturation level of the complexity serving as effective indicators. Our findings underscore the role of non-local interactions in accelerating the onset of chaos and modifying dynamical complexity in quantum spin chains.
We investigate signatures of quantum chaos within Ising spin chains subjected to transverse and longitudinal fields, incorporating both local (nearest-neighbor) and non-local (long-range) couplings. While local Ising models may exhibit integrable or chaotic dynamics contingent on interaction strengths and field parameters, systems with non-local interactions generally display a stronger propensity toward chaos, even when the non-local couplings are weak. By examining the distribution of energy level spacings through the level spacing ratio, we delineate the transition from integrable to chaotic regimes and characterize the emergence of quantum chaos in these systems. Our analysis demonstrates that non-local couplings facilitate faster operator spreading and more intricate dynamical behavior, enabling these systems to approach maximal chaos more readily than their local counterparts. Additionally, we analyze Krylov complexity as a dynamical probe of chaos, observing a characteristic peak followed by a plateau at late times in chaotic regimes. This behavior provides a quantitative means to distinguish between integrable and chaotic phases, with the growth rate and saturation level of the complexity serving as effective indicators. Our findings underscore the role of non-local interactions in accelerating the onset of chaos and modifying dynamical complexity in quantum spin chains.
Scrambling is a key concept in the analysis of nonequilibrium properties of quantum many-body systems. Most studies focus on its characterization via out-of-time-ordered correlation (OTOC) functions, particularly through the early-time decay of the OTOC. However, scrambling is a complex process which involves operator spreading and operator entanglement, and a full characterization requires one to access more refined information on the operator dynamics at several timescales. In this work we analyze operator scrambling by expanding the target operator in a complete basis and studying the structure of the expansion coefficients treated as a coarse-grained probability distribution in the space of operators. We study different features of this distribution, such as its mean, variance, and participation ratio, for the Ising model with longitudinal and transverse fields, kicked collective spin models, and random circuit models. We show that the long-time properties of the operator distribution display common features across these cases and discuss how these properties can be used as a proxy for the onset of quantum chaos. Finally, we discuss the connection with OTOCs and analyze the cost of probing the operator distribution experimentally using these correlation functions.
We investigate the integrability-to-chaos transition and information scrambling in Ising spin networks via a graph-theoretic formulation. Modeling spins as vertices and interactions as edges encoded by adjacency matrices across path, Erdos-Renyi, and Watts-Strogatz topologies, we demonstrate that long-range couplings and heterogeneous degree distributions markedly accelerate quantum information propagation. The Hamiltonian comprises local and normalized non-local interactions; tuning the non-local coupling and field heterogeneity drives integrability breaking. To quantify scrambling, we employ bipartite mutual and tripartite information. Increasing non-local interactions drives tripartite information to large negative values, signaling deep information scrambling. The squared commutators constructed from out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) exhibit early-time exponential growth; equivalently, the OTOC four-point functions themselves decay exponentially, yielding quantum Lyapunov exponents that scale systematically with parameters governing the chaotic regime. Complementing this, Krylov complexity reveals rapid operator growth in the chaotic phase, synchronizing with OTOC and mutual information dynamics. Spectrally, the transition manifests as a shift from Poissonian to Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics. The spectral form factor (SFF) exhibits the characteristic slope-dip-ramp-plateau structure, enabling the extraction of Thouless and Heisenberg times. Crucially, a reduced Thouless time strongly correlates with accelerated information and operator scrambling. Ultimately, this work establishes a unified framework bridging network topology with information-theoretic, operator, and spectral diagnostics, offering insights into thermalization and non-equilibrium dynamics in quantum many-body systems.