Out-of-time-order correlation at a quantum phase transition

Abstract

Motivated by the recent studies of out-of-time-order correlation functions and the holographic duality, we propose the quantum critical point conjecture, which is stated as: For a many-body quantum system with a quantum phase transition, the Lyapunov exponent extracted from the out-of-time-order correlators will exhibit a maximum around the quantum critical region. We first demonstrate that the Lyapunov exponent is well defined in the one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model with the help of the out-of-time-order correlation–Rényi-entropy theorem. We then support the conjecture by numerically computing the out-of-time-order correlators. We also compute the butterfly velocity, and propose an experiment protocol of measuring this correlator without inverting the Hamiltonian.