Mechanisms of scrambling and unscrambling of quantum information in the ground state in spin chains: domain-walls, spin-flips and scattering phase shifts

The spatiotemporal evolution of the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC) measures the propagation and scrambling of local quantum information. For the transverse field Ising model with open boundaries, the local operator ${\sigma }^x$ shows an interesting picture of the ground state OTOC where the local information gets scrambled throughout the entire system and, more strikingly, starts `unscrambling’ upon reflection at the other end. Earlier discussions of OTOCs did not explain the physical processes responsible for such scrambling and unscrambling of information. We explicitly show that in the paramagnetic phase, the scrambling and unscrambling is due to the scattering of a pair of low-energy spin-flip excitations, even in the presence of small interactions. In the ferromagnetic phase the same phenomena are explained by the motion of a domain-wall excitation. Thus, in different limits of the system parameters, we have provided a simple and almost complete understanding of the space-time pictures of the OTOCs, including the unscrambling, in terms of the low-energy excitations like one and two spin-flips or a single domain wall.