The out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) has recently become relevant in different areas where it has been linked to scrambling of quantum information and entanglement. It has also been proposed as a good indicator of quantum complexity. In this sense, the OTOC-RE theorem relates the OTOCs summed over a complete basis of operators to the second Renyi entropy. Here we have studied the OTOC-RE correspondence on physically meaningful bases like the ones constructed with the Pauli, reflection, and translation operators. The evolution is given by a paradigmatic bi-partite system consisting of two perturbed and coupled Arnold cat maps with different dynamics. We show that the sum over a small set of relevant operators is enough in order to obtain a very good approximation for the entropy and, hence, to reveal the character of the dynamics. In turn, this provides us with an alternative natural indicator of complexity, i.e., the scaling of the number of relevant operators with time. When represented in phase space, each one of these sets reveals the classical dynamical footprints with different depth according to the chosen basis.

• Received 31 July 2020
• Revised 24 September 2020
• Accepted 9 November 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.052133