Information scrambling in chaotic systems with dissipation

Abstract

Chaotic dynamics in closed local quantum systems scrambles quantum information, which is manifested quantitatively in the decay of the out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC) of local operators. How is information scrambling affected when the system is coupled to the environment and suffers from dissipation? In this paper, we address this question by defining a dissipative version of OTOC and numerically study its behavior in a prototypical chaotic quantum chain in the presence of dissipation. We find that dissipation leads to not only the overall decay of the scrambled information due to leaking but also structural changes so that the ‘information light cone’ can only reach a finite distance even when the effect of overall decay is removed. Based on this observation we conjecture a modified version of the Lieb-Robinson bound in dissipative systems.