Curator's Take
This article shows that a simple information‑theoretic quantity – the Haar‑averaged sum of total correlations (aSTC) – can reliably tell whether an open many‑body system is behaving integrably or chaotically, even when conventional out‑of‑time‑ordered correlators lose their contrast under realistic noise. By demonstrating that aSTC fluctuations remain size‑independent and survive non‑Markovian backflow, the work provides a practical diagnostic for quantum simulators and near‑term devices where decoherence is unavoidable. The result broadens the toolbox for probing scrambling and could help benchmark error‑resilient quantum processors as they scale up.
— Mark Eatherly
Summary
The dynamics of a quantum system encode signatures of whether the underlying Hamiltonian is integrable or chaotic, giving rise to the concept of quantum information scrambling through the properties of the resulting dynamical states or operators. We introduce an information-theoretic framework based on the Haar-averaged sum of total correlations (aSTC), together with average genuine multipartite entanglement generated dynamically from initially fully separable states, as robust probes of quantum information scrambling. Using the long-range quantum XYZ spin model in transverse and longitudinal magnetic fields, whose integrable limit is the nearest-neighbor transverse XY model, we demonstrate that the long-time average and, more importantly, the temporal fluctuations of the aSTC provide a faithful and system-size-independent signature of integrable and chaotic dynamics, similar to the conventional measure of scrambling, out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC). When the system is in contact with the thermal reservoir and system-bath coupling follows Markovianity, we find that the fluctuations of the aSTC and OTOC continue to distinguish integrable and chaotic dynamics only at intermediate times. However, we observe that in the non-Markovian domain, information backflow restores the scrambling dynamics, enabling the aSTC to retain its distinguishing power even at long times. Interestingly, we exhibit that, under Markovian amplitude damping and non-Markovian dephasing noise, the temporal fluctuations of the aSTC can discriminate between integrability and non-integrability in the weak Markovian regime, even when OTOC fails to do so.