Resource theory of quantum scrambling

Abstract

Quantum scrambling refers to the spread of local quantum information into the many degrees of freedom of a quantum system. In this work, we introduce a resource theory of scrambling which incorporates two mechanisms, "entanglement scrambling" and "magic scrambling". We introduce two resource monotones called the Pauli growth and the OTOC (out-of-time-ordered correlator) magic for these two mechanisms, respectively. We use our resource theory to explain recent experimental observations of magic. We also show that both resource monotones can be used to bound the decoding fidelity in Yoshida's black hole decoding protocol. These applications provide an operational interpretation of the resource monotones defined in this work.