Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators Beyond Lindblad
Abstract
Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) provide a powerful probe of quantum chaos and scrambling. While the Lindblad formalism is often used to describe OTOCs in open systems, microscopic mechanisms that give rise to the Lindblad equation at the level of time-ordered correlation functions do not necessarily justify this approach at the level of OTOCs. Starting from a microscopic model of a subsystem coupled to a random bath, we show that the resulting OTOC dynamics contains an additional contribution compared to the standard Lindblad approach. This contribution, induced by correlations between different replicas, allows key properties of the underlying unitary dynamics such as long-time freeness to be retained and information scrambling to be captured more faithfully. As an application, we show that this extended formalism can be used to numerically study OTOCs in large closed systems by replacing part of the system with a dissipative boundary, offering a way to study operator spreading and higher-order correlations beyond directly accessible system sizes.
Related
- Free Mutual Information and Higher-Point Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators
- Theory of steady states for Lindblad equations beyond time-independence: Classification, uniqueness and symmetry
- Beyond the lemon: Spectra of random Lindblad operators with a Hamiltonian component
- Diquark Correlators and Phase Structure in the Quark-Meson-Diquark Model beyond Mean Field
- Transformer-Based Time-Series Inference of Lindblad Dynamics in Open Quantum Systems
BibTeX
@misc{vallini2026outoftimeordered,
title = {{Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators Beyond Lindblad}},
author = {Elisa Vallini and Felix Fritzsch and Pieter W. Claeys},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.36029},
eprint = {2609.36029},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36029},
note = {CC BY-NC-SA 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators Beyond Lindblad
AU - Elisa Vallini
AU - Felix Fritzsch
AU - Pieter W. Claeys
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.36029
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36029
AB - Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) provide a powerful probe of quantum chaos and scrambling. While the Lindblad formalism is often used to describe OTOCs in open systems, microscopic mechanisms that give rise to the Lindblad equation at the level of time-ordered correlation functions do not necessarily justify this approach at the level of OTOCs. Starting from a microscopic model of a subsystem coupled to a random bath, we show that the resulting OTOC dynamics contains an additional contribution compared to the standard Lindblad approach. This contribution, induced by correlations between different replicas, allows key properties of the underlying unitary dynamics such as long-time freeness to be retained and information scrambling to be captured more faithfully. As an application, we show that this extended formalism can be used to numerically study OTOCs in large closed systems by replacing part of the system with a dissipative boundary, offering a way to study operator spreading and higher-order correlations beyond directly accessible system sizes.
ER -