Signature of universal fast scrambling in the transient response of a driven mott insulator system

The scrambling rateλ_s, a measure of the early growth of decoherence in an interacting quantum system, has been conjectured to have a universal saturation bound,λ_s⩽ 2πk_BT/ℏ, whereTis the temperature. This decoherence arises from the spread of quantum information over a large number of untracked degrees of freedom. The commonly studied indicator of scrambling is the out of time-ordered correlator (OTOC) of noncommuting quantum operators, in-turn related to generalized uncertainty relations, and reminiscent of the Lyapunov exponent of classically chaotic systems. From a practical measurement point of view, other quantities besides OTOCs, that are also sensitive to these generalized uncertainty relations, may capture the scrambling behavior. Here, using a large-NKeldysh field theory approach, we show that the nonequilibrium current response of a Mott insulator system consisting of a mesoscopic quantum dot array, when subjected to an electric field quench, reveals this phenomenon on account of number-phase uncertainty. Both ac and dc field quenches are considered. The passage from the initial Mott insulator phase with well-defined charge excitations, to the final nonequilibrium steady current state, is revealed in the transient current response that has Bloch-like oscillations. We find that the amplitude of these oscillations decreases at the universal rate, 2πk_BT/ℏ, associated with fast scramblers. Our Mott insulator model provides a new example of a fast scrambler in addition to the known ones such as extremal black holes and the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model.