Signatures of chaos in the dynamics of quantum discord

Simulating quantum chaos on a quantum computer

Noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers provide a new experimental platform for investigating the behaviour of complex quantum systems. We show that currently available NISQ devices can be used for versatile quantum simulations of chaotic systems. We introduce a classical-quantum hybrid approach for exploring the dynamics of the chaotic quantum kicked top (QKT) on a quantum computer. The programmability of this approach allows us to experimentally explore a broad range of QKT chaoticity parameter regimes inaccessible to previous studies. Furthermore, the number of gates in our simulation does not increase with the number of kicks, thus making it possible to study the QKT evolution for arbitrary number of kicks without fidelity loss. Using a publicly accessible NISQ computer (IBMQ), we observe periodicities in the evolution of the 2-qubit QKT, as well as signatures of chaos in the time-averaged 2-qubit entanglement. We also demonstrate a connection between entanglement and delocalization in the 2-qubit QKT, confirming theoretical predictions.

Out-of-time ordered correlators in kicked coupled tops: Information scrambling in mixed phase space and the role of conserved quantities

We study operator growth in a bipartite kicked coupled tops (KCTs) system using out-of-time ordered correlators (OTOCs), which quantify "information scrambling" due to chaotic dynamics and serve as a quantum analog of classical Lyapunov exponents. In the KCT system, chaos arises from the hyper-fine coupling between the spins. Due to a conservation law, the system's dynamics decompose into distinct invariant subspaces. Focusing initially on the largest subspace, we numerically verify that the OTOC growth rate aligns well with the classical Lyapunov exponent for fully chaotic dynamics. While previous studies have largely focused on scrambling in fully chaotic dynamics, works on mixed-phase space scrambling are sparse. We explore scrambling behavior in both mixed-phase space and globally chaotic dynamics. In the mixed-phase space, we use Percival's conjecture to partition the eigenstates of the Floquet map into "regular" and "chaotic." Using these states as the initial states, we examine how their mean phase space locations affect the growth and saturation of the OTOCs. Beyond the largest subspace, we study the OTOCs across the entire system, including all other smaller subspaces. For certain initial operators, we analytically derive the OTOC saturation using random matrix theory (RMT). When the initial operators are chosen randomly from the unitarily invariant random matrix ensembles, the averaged OTOC relates to the linear entanglement entropy of the Floquet operator, as found in earlier works. For the diagonal Gaussian initial operators, we provide a simple expression for the OTOC.

Witnessing quantum chaos using observational entropy

We study observation entropy (OE) for the quantum kicked top model, whose classical counterpart possesses different phases: regular, mixed, or chaotic, depending on the strength of the kicking parameter. We show that OE grows logarithmically with coarse-graining length beyond a critical value in the regular phase, while OE growth is much faster in the chaotic regime. In the dynamics, we demonstrate that the short-time growth rate of OE acts as a measure of the chaoticity in the system, and we compare our results with out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC). Moreover, we show that in the deep quantum regime, the results obtained from OE are much more robust compared to OTOC results. Finally, we also investigate the long-time behavior of OE to distinguish between saddle-point scrambling and true chaos, where the former shows large persistent fluctuations compared to the latter.

Effect of chaos on information gain in quantum tomography

Does chaos in the dynamics enable or impede information gain in quantum tomography? We address this question by considering continuous measurement tomography in which the measurement record is obtained as a sequence of expectation values of a Hermitian observable evolving under the repeated application of the Floquet map of the quantum kicked top. For a given dynamics and Hermitian observables, we observe completely opposite behavior in the tomography of well-localized spin coherent states compared to random states. As the chaos in the dynamics increases, the reconstruction fidelity of spin coherent states decreases. This contrasts with the previous results connecting information gain in tomography of random states with the degree of chaos in the dynamics that drives the system. The rate of information gain and hence the fidelity obtained in tomography depends not only on the degree of chaos in the dynamics and to what extent it causes the initial observable to spread in various directions of the operator space, but, more importantly, how well these directions are aligned with the density matrix to be estimated. Our study also gives an operational interpretation for operator spreading in terms of fidelity gain in an actual quantum information tomography protocol.

Effect of system energy on quantum signatures of chaos in the two-photon Dicke model

We have studied entanglement entropy and Husimi Q distribution as a tool to explore chaos in the quantum two-photon Dicke model. With the increase of the energy of a system, the linear entanglement entropy of a coherent state prepared in the classical chaotic and regular regions becomes more distinguishable, and the corresponding relationship between the distribution of time-averaged entanglement entropy and the classical Poincaré section has clearly been improved. Moreover, Husimi Q distribution for the initial states corresponding to the points in the chaotic region in the higher-energy system disperses more quickly than that in the lower-energy system. Our results imply that higher system energy has contributed to distinguishing between the chaotic and regular behavior in the quantum two-photon Dicke model.

NMR studies of quantum chaos in a two-qubit kicked top

Quantum chaotic kicked top model is implemented experimentally in a two-qubit system comprising of a pair of spin-1/2 nuclei using nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. The essential nonlinear interaction was realized using indirect spin-spin coupling, while the linear kicks were realized using radio-frequency pulses. After a variable number of kicks, quantum state tomography was employed to reconstruct the single-qubit reduced density matrices, using which we could extract von Neumann entropies and Husimi distributions. These measures enabled the study of correspondence with classical phase space as well as probing distinct features of quantum chaos, such as symmetries and temporal periodicity in the two-qubit kicked top.

Many-Body Quantum Chaos and Entanglement in a Quantum Ratchet

We uncover signatures of quantum chaos in the many-body dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate-based quantum ratchet in a toroidal trap. We propose measures including entanglement, condensate depletion, and spreading over a fixed basis in many-body Hilbert space, which quantitatively identify the region in which quantum chaotic many-body dynamics occurs, where random matrix theory is limited or inaccessible. With these tools, we show that many-body quantum chaos is neither highly entangled nor delocalized in the Hilbert space, contrary to conventionally expected signatures of quantum chaos.

Quantum-classical correspondence in the vicinity of periodic orbits

Quantum-classical correspondence in chaotic systems is a long-standing problem. We describe a method to quantify Bohr's correspondence principle and calculate the size of quantum numbers for which we can expect to observe quantum-classical correspondence near periodic orbits of Floquet systems. Our method shows how the stability of classical periodic orbits affects quantum dynamics. We demonstrate our method by analyzing quantum-classical correspondence in the quantum kicked top (QKT), which exhibits both regular and chaotic behavior. We use our correspondence conditions to identify signatures of classical bifurcations even in a deep quantum regime. Our method can be used to explain the breakdown of quantum-classical correspondence in chaotic systems.

Signatures of bifurcation on quantum correlations: Case of the quantum kicked top

Quantum correlations reflect the quantumness of a system and are useful resources for quantum information and computational processes. Measures of quantum correlations do not have a classical analog and yet are influenced by classical dynamics. In this work, by modeling the quantum kicked top as a multiqubit system, the effect of classical bifurcations on measures of quantum correlations such as the quantum discord, geometric discord, and Meyer and Wallach Q measure is studied. The quantum correlation measures change rapidly in the vicinity of a classical bifurcation point. If the classical system is largely chaotic, time averages of the correlation measures are in good agreement with the values obtained by considering the appropriate random matrix ensembles. The quantum correlations scale with the total spin of the system, representing its semiclassical limit. In the vicinity of trivial fixed points of the kicked top, the scaling function decays as a power law. In the chaotic limit, for large total spin, quantum correlations saturate to a constant, which we obtain analytically, based on random matrix theory, for the Q measure. We also suggest that it can have experimental consequences.