Operational Metric for Quantum Chaos and the Corresponding Spatiotemporal-Entanglement Structure

Abstract

Chaotic systems are highly sensitive to a small perturbation and are ubiquitous throughout the biological sciences, the physical sciences, and even the social sciences. Taking this as the underlying principle, we construct an operational notion for quantum chaos. Namely, we demand that the future state of a many-body isolated quantum system is sensitive to past multitime operations on a small subpart of that system. By “sensitive,” we mean that the resultant states from two different perturbations cannot easily be transformed into each other. That is, the pertinent quantity is the complexity of the effect of the perturbation within the final state. From this intuitive metric, which we call the butterfly-flutter fidelity, we use the language of multitime quantum processes to identify a series of operational conditions on chaos; in particular, the scaling of the spatiotemporal entanglement. Our criteria already contain the routine notions, as well as the well-known diagnostics for quantum chaos. This includes the Peres-Loschmidt echo, dynamical entropy, tripartite mutual information, and local-operator entanglement. We hence present a unified framework for these existing diagnostics within a single structure. We also go on to quantify how several mechanisms, such as evolution generated from random circuits, lead to quantum chaos. Our work paves the way to systematically study many-body dynamical phenomena such as many-body localization, measurement-induced phase transitions, and Floquet dynamics.