Abstract We investigate the relationship between thermodynamic phase transitions and the Lyapunov exponent of charged regular anti-de Sitter black holes in quasi-topological gravity. Our results show that the Lyapunov exponent displays multivalued behavior during phase transitions. Moreover, along the coexistence curve the Lyapunov exponent changes discontinously and continuously at the critical point. Near the critical point, the Lyapunov exponent follows a power-law behavior with a critical exponent of 1/2, suggesting its role as an order parameter and encodes information on black hole phase transitions.
Xie et al. (2025) studied this question.