Floquet engineered inhomogeneous quantum chaos in critical systems

Understand

We study universal chaotic dynamics of a large class of periodically driven critical systems described by spatially inhomogeneous conformal field theories.

• By employing an effective curved spacetime approach, we show that the onset of quantum chaotic correlations, captured by the Lyapunov exponent of out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs), is set by the Hawking temperature of emergent Floquet horizons.
• Furthermore, scrambling of quantum information is shown to be strongly inhomogeneous, leading to transitions from chaotic to non-chaotic regimes by tuning driving parameters.
• We finally use our framework to propose a concrete protocol to simulate and measure OTOCs in quantum simulators, by designing an efficient stroboscopic backward time evolution.