%0 Journal Article %J Phys. Rev. %D 2018 %T Resilience of scrambling measurements %A Brian Swingle %A Nicole Yunger Halpern %X

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.

%B Phys. Rev. %V A %8 2018/06/18 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01587 %N 97 %& 062113 %R https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.97.062113