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The exponential growth of the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) has been proposed as a quantum signature of classical chaos. The growth rate is expected to coincide with the classical Lyapunov exponent. This quantum-classical correspondence has been corroborated for the kicked rotor and the stadium billiard, which are one-body chaotic systems. The conjecture has not yet been validated for realistic systems with interactions. We make progress in this direction by studying the OTOC in the Dicke model, where two-level atoms cooperatively interact with a quantized radiation field. For parameters where the model is chaotic in the classical limit, the OTOC increases exponentially in time with a rate that closely follows the classical Lyapunov exponent.Quantum chaos tries to bridge quantum and classical mechanics. The search for quantum signatures of classical chaos has ranged from level statistics [1,2] and the structure of the eigenstates [3,4] to the exponential increase of complexity [5,6] and the exponential decay of the overlap of two wave packets [7][8][9][10]. Recently, the pursuit of exponential instabilities in the quantum domain has been revived by the conjecture of a bound on the rate growth of the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) [11,12]. First introduced in the context of superconductivity [13], the OTOC is now presented as a measure of quantum chaos, with its growth rate being associated with the classical Lyapunov exponent. The OTOC is not only a theoretical quantity, but has also been measured experimentally via nuclear magnetic resonance techniques [14][15][16][17].The correspondence between the OTOC growth rate and the classical Lyapunov exponent has been explicitly shown in two cases of one-body chaotic systems, the kicked-rotor [18] and, after a first unsuccessful attempt [19], the stadium billiard [20]. It was also achieved for chaotic maps [21]. For interacting many-body systems, while exponential behaviors for the OTOC have been found for the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model [11,22] and for the Bose-Hubbard model [23,24], a direct demonstration of the quantum-classical correspondence has not yet been made. Studies in this direction include [6,[25][26][27][28][29] and [30].Here, we investigate the OTOC for the Dicke model [31,32]. Comparing with one-body systems, the model is a step up toward an explicit quantum-classical correspondence for interacting many-body systems, since it contains N atoms interacting with a quantized field.The Dicke model was originally proposed to explain the collective phenomenon of superradiance: the field mediates interatomic interactions, which causes the atoms to act collectively [31,33]. Superradiance has been experimentally studied with ultracold atoms in optical cavities [34][35][36][37][38][39]. The model has also found applications beyond superradiance in various different fields. It has been employed, for instance, in studies of ground-state and excited-state quantum phase tran-sitions [33,[40][41][42][43][44], entanglement creation [45], nonequilibrium dynamic...

We review the effects of excited-state quantum phase transitions (ESQPTs) in interacting many-body systems with finite numbers of collective degrees of freedom. We classify typical ESQPT signatures in the spectra of energy eigenstates with respect to the underlying classical dynamics and outline a variety of quantum systems in which they occur. We describe thermodynamic and dynamic consequences of ESQPTs, like those in microcanonical thermodynamics, quantum quench dynamics, and in the response to nearly adiabatic or periodic driving. We hint at some generalizations of the ESQPT concept in periodic lattices and in resonant tunneling systems.

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The influence of quantum phase transitions on the evolution of excited levels in the critical parameter region is discussed. The analysis is performed for 1D and 2D systems with first-and second-order ground-state transitions. Examples include the cusp and nuclear collective Hamiltonians. Applications in systems of higher dimensions are possible.

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Classical stationary points of an analytic Hamiltonian induce singularities of the density of quantum energy levels and their flow with a control parameter in the system's infinite-size limit. We show that for a system with f degrees of freedom, a non-degenerate stationary point with index r causes a discontinuity (for r even) or divergence (r odd) of the (f −1) th derivative of both density and flow of the spectrum. An increase of flatness for a degenerate stationary point shifts the singularity to lower derivatives. The findings are verified in an f = 3 toy model.

We study the quantum quench dynamics in an extended version of the Dicke model where an additional parameter allows a smooth transition to the integrable Tavis-Cummings regime. We focus on the influence of various quantum phases and excited-state quantum phase transitions (ESQPTs) on the survival probability of the initial state. We show that, depending on the quench protocol, an ESQPT can either stabilize the initial state or, on the contrary, speed up its decay to the equilibrated regime. Quantum chaos smears out the manifestations of ESQPTs in quench dynamics, therefore significant effects can only be observed in integrable or weakly chaotic settings. Similar features are present also in the post-quench dynamics of some observables.