A long period of linear growth in the spectral form factor provides a universal diagnostic of quantum chaos at intermediate times. By contrast, the behavior of the spectral form factor in disordered integrable many-body models is not well understood. Here we study the two-body Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and show that the spectral form factor features an exponential ramp, in sharp contrast to the linear ramp in chaotic models. We find a novel mechanism for this exponential ramp in terms of a high-dimensional manifold of saddle points in the path integral formulation of the spectral form factor. This manifold arises because the theory enjoys a large symmetry group. With finite nonintegrable interaction strength, these delicate symmetries reduce to a relative time translation, causing the exponential ramp to give way to a linear ramp.
A long period of linear growth in the spectral form factor provides a universal diagnostic of quantum chaos at intermediate times. By contrast, the behavior of the spectral form factor in disordered integrable many-body models is not well understood. Here we study the two-body Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and show that the spectral form factor features an exponential ramp, in sharp contrast to the linear ramp in chaotic models. We find a novel mechanism for this exponential ramp in terms of a high-dimensional manifold of saddle points in the path integral formulation of the spectral form factor. This manifold arises because the theory enjoys a large symmetry group. With finite nonintegrable interaction strength, these delicate symmetries reduce to a relative time translation, causing the exponential ramp to give way to a linear ramp.
Ergodicity is a fundamental principle of statistical mechanics underlying the behavior of generic quantum many-body systems.However, how this universal many-body quantum chaotic regime emerges due to interactions remains largely a puzzle.This paper demonstrates using both heuristic arguments and a microscopic calculation that a dephasing mechanism, similar to Altshuler-Aronov-Khmelnitskii dephasing in the theory of localization, underlies this transition to chaos.We focus on the behavior of the spectral form factor (SFF) as a function of "time" t, which characterizes level correlations in the many-body spectrum.The SFF can be expressed as a sum over periodic classical orbits and its behavior hinges on the interference of trajectories related to each other by a time translation.In the absence of interactions, time-translation symmetry is present for each individual particle, which leads to a fast exponential growth of the SFF and correspondingly loss of correlations between many-body levels.Interactions lead to dephasing, which disrupts interference, and breaks the massive time-translation symmetry down to a global time-translation/energy conservation.This in turn gives rise to the hallmark linear-in-t ramp in the SFF reflecting Wigner-Dyson level repulsion.This general picture is supported by a microscopic analysis of an interacting many-body model.Specifically, we study the complex SYK 2 + SYK 2 2 model, which allows to tune between an integrable and chaotic regime.It is shown that the dephasing mass vanishes in the former case, which maps to the noninteracting complex SYK 2 model via a time reparameterization.In contrast, the chaotic regime gives rise to dephasing, which suppresses the exponential ramp of the noninteracting theory and induces correlations between many-body levels.
We have drawn connections between the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and the multi-orbit Hatsugai-Kohmoto model, emphasizing their similarities and differences regarding chaotic behaviors. The features of the spectral form factor, such as the dip-ramp-plateau structure and the adjacent gap ratio, indicate chaos in the disordered orbital Hatsugai-Kohmoto model. One significant conclusion is that the plateau value of the out-of-time-order correlator, whether in the Hatsugai-Kohmoto model, Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with two- or four-body interactions, or a disorder-free Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, does not effectively differentiate between integrable and chaotic phases in many-body systems. This observation suggests a limitation in using out-of-time-order correlator plateau values as a diagnostic tool for chaos. Our exploration of these ideas provides a deeper understanding of how chaos arises in non-Fermi liquid systems and the tools we use to study it. It opens the door to further questions, particularly about whether there are more effective ways to distinguish between chaotic and integrable phases in these complex systems.
We have drawn connections between the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and the multi-orbit Hatsugai-Kohmoto model, emphasizing their similarities and differences regarding chaotic behaviors. The features of the spectral form factor, such as the dip-ramp-plateau structure and the adjacent gap ratio, indicate chaos in the disordered orbital Hatsugai-Kohmoto model. One significant conclusion is that the plateau value of the out-of-time-order correlator, whether in the Hatsugai-Kohmoto model, Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with two- or four-body interactions, or a disorder-free Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, does not effectively differentiate between integrable and chaotic phases in many-body systems. This observation suggests a limitation in using out-of-time-order correlator plateau values as a diagnostic tool for chaos. Our exploration of these ideas provides a deeper understanding of how chaos arises in non-Fermi-liquid systems and the tools we use to study it. It opens the door to further questions, particularly about whether there are more effective ways to distinguish between chaotic and integrable phases in these complex systems.
We numerically study the spectral statistics of open quantum many-body systems (OQMBS) as signatures of quantum chaos (or the lack thereof), using the dissipative spectral form factor (DSFF), a generalization of the spectral form factor to complex spectra. We show that the DSFF of chaotic OQMBS generically displays the quadratic ramp-plateau behaviour of the Ginibre ensemble from random matrix theory, in contrast to the linear ramp-plateau behaviour of the Gaussian ensemble in closed quantum systems. Furthermore, in the presence of many-body interactions, such RMT behaviour emerges only after a time scale τdev, which generally increases with system size for sufficiently large system size, and can be identified as the non-Hermitian analogue of the many-body Thouless time. The universality of the random matrix theory behavior is demonstrated by surveying twelve models of OQMBS, including random Kraus circuits (quantum channels) and random Lindbladians (Liouvillians) in several symmetry classes, as well as Lindbladians of paradigmatic models such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK), XXZ, and the transverse field Ising models. We devise an unfolding and filtering procedure to remove variations of the averaged density of states which would otherwise hide the universal RMT-like signatures in the DSFF for chaotic OQMBS. Beyond chaotic OQMBS, we study the spectral statistics of non-chaotic OQMBS, specifically the integrable XX model and a system in the many-body localized (MBL) regime in the presence of dissipation, which exhibit DSFF behaviours distinct from the ramp-plateau behaviour of random matrix theory. Lastly, we study the DSFF of Lindbladians with the Hamiltonian term set to zero, i.e. only the jump operators are present, and demonstrate that the results of RMT universality and scaling of many-body Thouless time survive even without coherent evolution.
Quantum chaos is commonly associated with the emergence of random-matrix statistics in the spectra of quantum systems. A useful diagnostic is provided by the spectral form factor (SFF), which for random matrix ensembles displays a universal linear-growth regime (`ramp'). In the last decade, a landmark result by Bertini, Kos and Prosen (BKP) identified for the first time a class of geometrically local quantum dynamics of finite-dimensional particles where the SFF provably exhibits a random-matrix ramp: periodically driven (Floquet) qudit chains whose evolution is described by `dual-unitary' circuits. Here, building on the BKP result and on a recently proposed variant of the Feynman-Kitaev clock construction, we obtain a spectral ramp in a class of static, geometrically local Hamiltonians. Our strategy is to embed the Floquet quasienergy spectrum of a dual-unitary circuit into the energy spectrum of a static local Hamiltonian, and to prove that the latter's connected SFF inherits the BKP ramp within a symmetry sector. This is to our knowledge the first proof of a spectral ramp in a time-independent, geometrically local many-body system with finite local Hilbert space dimension.
We consider a noninteracting many-fermion system populating levels of a unitary random matrix ensemble (equivalent to the q=2 complex Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model)-a generic model of single-particle quantum chaos. We study the corresponding many-particle level statistics by calculating the spectral form factor analytically using algebraic methods of random matrix theory, and match it with an exact numerical simulation. Despite the integrability of the theory, the many-body spectral rigidity is found to have a surprisingly rich landscape. In particular, we find a residual repulsion of distant many-body levels stemming from single-particle chaos, together with islands of level attraction. These results are encoded in an exponential ramp in the spectral form factor, which we show to be a universal feature of nonergodic many-fermion systems embedded in a chaotic medium.