Exponential growth of out-of-time-order correlator without chaos: inverted harmonic oscillator

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that exponential growth of out-of-time-order correlators can occur in non-chaotic quantum systems with inverted harmonic oscillator potentials, challenging the notion that such growth solely indicates chaos.

Contribution

It shows that exponential OTOC growth is universal in certain non-chaotic systems and establishes a bound on the Lyapunov exponent similar to the chaos bound.

Findings

Exponential OTOC growth observed at high temperatures.

Lyapunov exponent remains non-zero without chaos.

Universal features across different potential shapes.

Abstract

We provide a detailed examination of a thermal out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) growing exponentially in time in systems without chaos. The system is a one-dimensional quantum mechanics with a potential whose part is an inverted harmonic oscillator. We numerically observe the exponential growth of the OTOC when the temperature is higher than a certain threshold. The Lyapunov exponent is found to be of the order of the classical Lyapunov exponent generated at the hilltop, and it remains non-vanishing even at high temperature. We adopt various shape of the potential and find these features universal. The study confirms that the exponential growth of the thermal OTOC does not necessarily mean chaos when the potential includes a local maximum. We also provide a bound for the Lyapunov exponent of the thermal OTOC in generic quantum mechanics in one dimension, which is of the same form as the chaos bound obtained by Maldacena, Shenker and Stanford.