Signatures of the interplay between chaos and local criticality on the dynamics of scrambling in many-body systems

Fast scrambling, quantified by the exponential initial growth of Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlators (OTOCs), is the ability to efficiently spread quantum correlations among the degrees of freedom of interacting systems, and constitutes a characteristic signature of local unstable dynamics. As such, it may equally manifest both in systems displaying chaos or in integrable systems around criticality. Here, we go beyond these extreme regimes with an exhaustive study of the interplay between local criticality and chaos right at the intricate phase space region where the integrability-chaos transition first appears. We address systems with a well defined classical (mean-field) limit, as coupled large spins and Bose-Hubbard chains, thus allowing for semiclassical analysis. Our aim is to investigate the dependence of the exponential growth of the OTOCs, defining the quantum Lyapunov exponent \(\lambda_{\textrm{q}}\) on quantities derived from the classical system with mixed phase space, specifically the local stability exponent of a fixed point \(\lambda_{\textrm{loc}}\) as well as the maximal Lyapunov exponent \(\lambda_{\textrm{L}}\) of the chaotic region around it. By extensive numerical simulations covering a wide range of parameters we give support to a conjectured linear dependence \(2\lambda_{\textrm{q}}=a\lambda_{\textrm{L}}+b\lambda_{\textrm{loc}}\), providing a simple route to characterize scrambling at the border between chaos and integrability.