Signature of chaos and delocalization in a periodically driven many-body system: An out-of-time-order-correlation study

Abstract

We study out-of-time-order correlation (OTOC) for one-dimensional periodically driven hardcore bosons in the presence of Aubry-Andr\'e (AA) potential and show that both the spectral properties and the saturation values of OTOC in the steady state of these driven systems provide a clear distinction between the localized and delocalized phases of these models. Our results, obtained via exact numerical diagonalization of these boson chains, thus indicate that OTOC can provide a signature of drive-induced delocalization, even for systems which do not have a well-defined semiclassical (and/or large $N$) limit. We demonstrate the presence of such a signature by analyzing two different drive protocols for hardcore boson chains leading to distinct physical phenomena and discuss experiments which can test our theory.