Finite-size scaling of out-of-time-ordered correlators at late times

Chaotic dynamics in quantum many-body systems scrambles local information so that at late times it can no longer be accessed locally. This is reflected quantitatively in the out-of-time-ordered correlator of local operators which is expected to decay to zero with time. However, for systems of finite size, out-of-time-ordered correlators do not decay exactly to zero and we show in this paper that the residue value can provide useful insights into the chaotic dynamics. In particular, we show that when energy is conserved, the late-time saturation value of out-of-time-ordered correlators for generic traceless local operators scales inverse polynomially with the system size. This is in contrast to the inverse exponential scaling expected for chaotic dynamics without energy conservation. We provide both analytical arguments and numerical simulations to support this conclusion.