Out-of-Time-Order Correlators and Quantum Phase Transitions in the Rabi and Dicke Models

The out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) is used to study the quantum phase transitions (QPTs) between the normal phase and the superradiant phase in the Rabi and few-body Dicke models with large frequency ratio of the atomic level splitting to the single-mode electromagnetic radiation field frequency. The focus is on the OTOC thermally averaged with infinite temperature, which is an experimentally feasible quantity. It is shown that the critical points can be identified by long-time averaging of the OTOC via observing its local minimum behavior. More importantly, the scaling laws of the OTOC for QPTs are revealed by studying the experimentally accessible conditions with finite frequency ratio and finite number of atoms in the studied models. The critical exponents extracted from the scaling laws of OTOC indicate that the QPTs in the Rabi and Dicke models belong to the same universality class.