  Quantum scrambling is the dispersal of local information into many-body
quantum entanglements and correlations distributed throughout the entire
system. This concept underlies the dynamics of thermalization in closed quantum
systems, and more recently has emerged as a powerful tool for characterizing
chaos in black holes. However, the direct experimental measurement of quantum
scrambling is difficult, owing to the exponential complexity of ergodic
many-body entangled states. One way to characterize quantum scrambling is to
measure an out-of-time-ordered correlation function (OTOC); however, since
scrambling leads to their decay, OTOCs do not generally discriminate between
quantum scrambling and ordinary decoherence. Here, we implement a quantum
circuit that provides a positive test for the scrambling features of a given
unitary process. This approach conditionally teleports a quantum state through
the circuit, providing an unambiguous litmus test for scrambling while
projecting potential circuit errors into an ancillary observable. We engineer
quantum scrambling processes through a tunable 3-qubit unitary operation as
part of a 7-qubit circuit on an ion trap quantum computer. Measured
teleportation fidelities are typically $\sim80\%$, and enable us to
experimentally bound the scrambling-induced decay of the corresponding OTOC
measurement.
