Resilience of Measurement Protocols for Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators

Out-of-time-ordered-correlators (OTOCs) have emerged as a useful tool to study quantum chaos and the scrambling and delocalization of information in many-body systems. While challenging, their experimental measurement has been achieved in NMR and trapped ion systems. In this work, we study the effect of experimental nonidealities on two measurement protocols, namely, one based on quantum clocks and the other on sequential weak measurements. For concreteness, we consider circuit implementations for the spin chain and kicked-top that may be achieved with current hardware.