Relative asymptotic oscillations of the out-of-time-ordered correlator as a quantum chaos indicator.

Abstract

A detailed numerical study reveals that the asymptotic values of the standard-deviation-to-mean ratio of the out-of-time-ordered correlator in energy eigenstates 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 energy-smoothed 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 chaos indicator.