English

Scrambling in quantum cellular automata

Quantum Physics 2023-05-01 v3 Strongly Correlated Electrons High Energy Physics - Theory Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases

Abstract

Scrambling is the delocalization of quantum information over a many-body system and underlies all quantum-chaotic dynamics. We employ discrete quantum cellular automata as classically simulable toy models of scrambling. We observe that these automata break ergodicity, i.e. they exhibit quantum scarring. We also find that the time-scale of scrambling rises with the local Hilbert-space dimension and obeys a specific combinatorial pattern. We then show that scarring is mostly suppressed in a semiclassical limit, demonstrating that semiclassical-chaotic systems are more ergodic.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.07722,
  title  = {Scrambling in quantum cellular automata},
  author = {Brian Kent and Sarah Racz and Sanjit Shashi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.07722},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

7 pages (including supplement), 5 figures; version 2: references added; version 3: typos fixed, matches version to be published in PRB

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:14:48.646Z