Classical out-of-time-order correlators for Bose-Hubbard systems and their relation to the finite-time Lyapunov exponent

The out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) is studied for a bosonic quantum lattice model. We gain its classical analog through the replacement of both commutators appearing in the quantum correlator by a corresponding Poisson bracket. The evaluation of the Poisson bracket is then performed in a complex-valued description of the Hamiltonian dynamics and, for the initial choice of quantum operators to be site-specific annihilators, turns out to be given by the expectation value of the absolute square of a specific element of the complex-valued monodromy matrix. The growth rate of this expectation value is compared to a typical chaos indicator, the mean finite-time Lyapunov exponent (FTLE). In both cases the numerical phase-space average is weighted by a Wigner function corresponding to a multimode coherent state. For a three-well Bose-Hubbard model in the Mott insulator regime, it is found that although, on the level of single trajectories, FTLE and classical OTOC show similar long-time behavior, after averaging, they exhibit a marked difference [which for purely chaotic initial conditions is close to ln(sqrt[2])], rooting in the different order the logarithm and the average are taken. This observation is an example of the relevance of the fluctuations of the FTLE to correctly explain the quantitative difference between OTOC growth rate and FTLE in a prototypical many-body system.