TY - JOUR T1 - Resilience of scrambling measurements JF - Phys. Rev. Y1 - 2018 A1 - Brian Swingle A1 - Nicole Yunger Halpern AB -

Most experimental protocols for measuring scrambling require time evolution with a Hamiltonian and with the Hamiltonian's negative counterpart (backwards time evolution). Engineering controllable quantum many-body systems for which such forward and backward evolution is possible is a significant experimental challenge. Furthermore, if the system of interest is quantum-chaotic, one might worry that any small errors in the time reversal will be rapidly amplified, obscuring the physics of scrambling. This paper undermines this expectation: We exhibit a renormalization protocol that extracts nearly ideal out-of-time-ordered-correlator measurements from imperfect experimental measurements. We analytically and numerically demonstrate the protocol's effectiveness, up to the scrambling time, in a variety of models and for sizable imperfections. The scheme extends to errors from decoherence by an environment.

VL - A UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01587 CP - 97 U5 - https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.97.062113 ER -