Chaos signatures in the short and long time behavior of the out-of-time ordered correlator

Abstract

Two properties are needed for a classical system to be chaotic: exponential stretching and mixing. Recently, out-of-time order correlators were proposed as a measure of chaos in a wide range of physical systems. While most of the attention has previously been devoted to the short time stretching aspect of chaos, characterized by the Lyapunov exponent, we show for quantum maps that the out-of-time correlator approaches its stationary value exponentially with a rate determined by the Ruelle-Pollicot resonances. This property constitutes clear evidence of the dual role of the underlying classical chaos dictating the behavior of the correlator at different timescales.