Abstract We investigate the thermalization of Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) models coupled via random interactions following quenches from the perspective of entanglement. Previous studies have shown that when a system of two SYK models coupled by random two-body terms is quenched from the thermofield double state with sufficiently low effective temperature, the Rényi entropies do not saturate to the expected thermal values in the large- N limit. Using numerical large- N methods, we first show that the Rényi entropies in a pair SYK models coupled by two-body terms can thermalize, if quenched from a state with sufficiently high effective temperature, and hence exhibit state-dependent thermalization. In contrast, SYK models coupled by single-body terms appear to always thermalize. We provide evidence that the subthermal behavior in the former system is likely a large- N artifact by repeating the quench for finite N and finding that the saturation value of the Rényi entropy extrapolates to the expected thermal value in the N → ∞ limit. Finally, as a finer grained measure of thermalization, we compute the late-time spectral form factor of the reduced density matrix after the quench. While a single SYK dot exhibits perfect agreement with random matrix theory, both the quadratically and quartically coupled SYK models exhibit slight deviations.
Abstract Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) is a concrete solvable model with non-Fermi liquid behavior and maximal chaos. In this work, we study the entanglement Rényi entropy for the subsystems of the SYK model in the Kourkoulou-Maldacena states. We use the path-integral approach and take the saddle point approximation in the large-N limit. We find a first-order transition exist when tuning the subsystem size for the q = 4 case, while it is absent for the q = 2 case. We further study the entanglement dynamics for such states under the real-time evolution for noninteracting, weakly interacting and strongly interacting SYK(-like) models.
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a quantum-mechanical model of fermions interacting with
q-body random couplings. For
q=2, it describes free particles and is nonchaotic in the many-body sense, while for
q>2 it is strongly interacting and exhibits many-body chaos. In this work we study the entanglement entropy (EE) of the
SYKq models for a bipartition of
N real or complex fermions into subsystems containing
2m real/
m complex fermions and $N\ensuremath{-}2m$/$N\ensuremath{-}m$ fermions in the remainder. For the free model
SYK2, we obtain an analytic expression for the EE, derived from the $\ensuremath{\beta}$-Jacobi random matrix ensemble. Furthermore, we use the replica trick and path-integral formalism to show that the EE is maximal when one subsystem is small, i.e., $m\ensuremath{\ll}N$, for arbitrary
q. We also demonstrate that the EE for the SYK4 model is noticeably smaller than the Page value when the two subsystems are comparable in size, i.e.,
m/N is
O(1). Finally, we explore the EE for a model with both SYK2 and SYK4 interactions and find a crossover from SYK2 (low-temperature) to SYK4 (high-temperature) behavior as we vary energy.
We study the spread of Rényi entropy between two halves of a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) chain of Majorana fermions, prepared in a thermofield double (TFD) state. The SYK chain model is a model of chaotic many-body systems, which describes a one-dimensional lattice of Majorana fermions, with spatially local random quartic interaction. We find that for integer Rényi index n > 1, the Rényi entanglement entropy saturates at a parametrically smaller value than expected. This implies that the TFD state of the SYK chain does not rapidly thermalize, despite being maximally chaotic: instead, it rapidly approaches a prethermal state. We compare our results to the signatures of thermalization observed in other quenches in the SYK model, and to intuition from nearly-AdS2 gravity.
The subsystem-size dependence of ground-state entanglement entropy and its crossover to thermal entropy as a function of temperature are well understood for one-dimensional (1D) gapless systems described by conformal field theory (CFT), and for free fermions with a Fermi surface in any dimension. However, little is known about the entanglement entropy for gapless fermionic systems without quasi-particles, such as a strange metal. Here we study the entanglement entropy of fermions in a solvable large-
N 1D lattice model akin to the Yukawa-Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (Yukawa SYK) model. In this model, two Fermi points are coupled to scalar bosons via spatially random Yukawa interactions, providing a solvable model of a strange metal when the bosons become critical at a quantum critical point. We exactly compute the second Rényi entropy of fermions in a spatial subregion in this model. Our results unravel crucial role of intra-subregion entanglement between fermionic and bosonic degrees of freedom along with the inter-subregion entanglement in understanding the ground states of such strongly coupled fermion-boson systems. We show that the crossover from thermal entropy to entanglement entropy, is captured by a single scaling ansatz, that collapses the second Rényi entropy of fermions for different subregion sizes and temperatures into a single universal curve. We further show that the universal scaling curve for the critical strange metal is well described by the standard CFT formula, albeit with an effective central charge substantially larger than the non-interacting value.
We study a description of the large N limit of the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) model in terms of quantum mechanics without quenched disorder. Instead of random couplings, we introduce massive scalar fields coupled to fermions, and study a small mass limit of the theory. We show that, under a certain condition, the correlation functions of fermions reproduce those of the SYK model with a temperature dependent coupling constant in the large N limit. We also discuss a supersymmetric generalization of our quantum mechanical model. As a byproduct, we develop an efficient way of estimating the large N behavior of correlators in the SYK model.