Out-of-time-ordered correlators for turbulent fields: a quantum-classical correspondence

An extended formulation of out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), which quantify noncommutative operator growth and information scrambling in quantum many-body systems, is developed for turbulence dynamics as a representative of non-canonical Hamiltonian systems. Based on the Wigner-Weyl transform and the Moyal bracket formalism, the semiclassical limit of OTOC for turbulent plasmas governed by the Hasegawa-Mima equation is derived as an ensemble-averaged squared Lie-Poisson bracket between two chosen functionals of the turbulent fields. The classical-limit OTOC provides a quantitative measure of how a variational perturbation applied to one functional propagates across scales in the turbulent dynamics and how it affects another functional at a later time, thereby capturing scale-dependent or field-dependent transfer processes. In a quasilinear approximation with a strong zonal flow, we derive an inverse-square decay of the OTOC with the time lag, indicating an algebraic suppression of the zonal-mode response to perturbations of the non-zonal fields. This behavior is attributed to zonal-flow shearing, which rapidly scrambles the non-zonal perturbation toward higher wavenumbers, and consequently reduces the low-wavenumber non-zonal content that can feed back onto large-scale zonal modes.