Many-site Bose-Hubbard lattices display complex semiclassical dynamics, with both chaotic and regular features. We have characterised chaos in the semiclassical dynamics of short Bose-Hubbard chains using both stroboscopic phase space projections and finite-time Lyapunov exponents. We found that chaos was present for intermediate collisional nonlinearity in the open trimer and quatramer systems, with soft chaos and Kolmogoroff-Arnold-Moser islands evident. We have found that the finite-time Lyapunov exponents are consistent with stroboscopic maps for the prediction of chaos in these small systems. This gives us confidence that the finite-time Lyapunov exponents will be a useful tool for the characterisation of chaos in larger systems, where meaningful phase-space projections are not possible and the dimensionality of the problem can make the standard methods intractable.
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