Signatures of quantum chaos in an out-of-time-order matrix

Motivated by the famous ink-drop experiment, where ink droplets are used to determine the chaoticity of a fluid, we propose an experimentally implementable method for measuring the scrambling capacity of quantum processes. Here, a system of interest interacts with a small quantum probe whose dynamical properties identify the chaoticity of the system. Specifically, we propose a fully quantum version of the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) - which we term the out-of-time-order matrix (OTOM) - whose correlations offer clear information theoretic meanings about the chaoticity of a process. We illustrate the utility of the OTOM as a signature of chaos using random unitary processes as well as in the quantum kicked rotor, where the chaoticity is tuneable.