Resource theory of quantum scrambling

Abstract

Quantum chaos has become a cornerstone of physics through its many applications. One trademark of quantum chaotic systems is the spread of local quantum information, which physicists call scrambling. In this work, we introduce a mathematical definition of scrambling and a resource theory to measure it. We also describe two applications of this theory. First, we use our resource theory to provide a bound on magic, a potential source of quantum computational advantage, which can be efficiently measured in experiment. Second, we also show that scrambling resources bound the success of Yoshida's black hole decoding protocol.