The out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) is central to the understanding of information scrambling in quantum many-body systems. In this work, we show that the OTOC in a quantum many-body system close to its critical point obeys dynamical scaling laws which are specified by a few universal critical exponents of the quantum critical point. Such scaling laws of the OTOC imply a universal form for the butterfly velocity of a chaotic system in the quantum critical region and allow one to locate the quantum critical point and extract all universal critical exponents of the quantum phase transitions. We numerically confirm the universality of the butterfly velocity in a chaotic model, namely, the transverse axial next-nearest-neighbor Ising model, and show the feasibility of extracting the critical properties of quantum phase transitions from OTOC using the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model.

• Received 3 June 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.100.195107