The SYK model spectral form factor exhibits absence of information loss in the form of a ramp and a plateau that are typical of random matrix theory. In a large N collective fields description, the ramp was reproduced by Saad, Shenker and Stanford by a connected component of the analytically continued thermal partition function two point correlator. The existence of an \emph{off shell} connected component for the real time partition function is a consequence of disorder averaging over a statistical ensemble of two replica systems. In particular, the ramp arises from a family of vanishing action replica-non-diagonal conformal saddles. We provide a derivation of the soft modes effective action for fluctuations around the ramp conformal saddles, by adapting to the two replica system a method used by Kitaev and Suh in regular SYK.
Abstract We study the SYK model in the large N limit beyond the replica-diagonal approximation. First we show that there are exact replica-nondiagonal solutions of the saddle point equations for q = 2 for any finite replica number M.In the interacting q = 4 case we are able to construct the numerical solutions, which are in one-to-one correspondence to the analytic solutions of the quadratic model. These solutions are singular in the M → 0 limit in both quadratic and quartic interaction cases. The calculations of the on-shell action at finite integer M show that the nondiagonal replica-symmetric saddles are subleading in both quadratic and quartic cases. We also study replica-nondiagonal solutions of the SYK in the strong coupling limit. For arbitrary q we show that besides the usual solutions of the replica-diagonal saddle point equations in the conformal limit, there are also replica-nondiagonal solutions for any value of M (including zero). The specific configurations that we study, have factorized time and replica dependencies. The corresponding saddle point equations are separable at strong coupling, and can be solved using the Parisi ansatz from spin glass theory. We construct the solutions which correspond to the replica-symmetric case and to one-step replica symmetry breaking. We compute the regularizized free energy on these solutions in the limit of zero replicas. It is observed that there are nondiagonal solutions with the regularized free energy lower than that of the standard diagonal conformal solution.
We derive the late-time ramp of the finite-temperature spectral form factor in the double-scaled SYK model directly from cactus diagrams, which is introduced as a multi-trace generalization of chord diagram in Ref \cite{Berkooz:2020fvm}. Although single-trace observables admit an exact chord-diagram description, multi-trace sums are obstructed by the chord-intersection weights
qIJ, which cannot be averaged independently to
q. Our key idea is that the non-analytic contribution responsible for the ramp is controlled by the large-order tail of the Cactus-diagram expansion and is insensitive to finite changes in its low-order analytic terms. Decomposing the contribution with
n-cross-trace-pairings Cactus diagram into two buds
Bn and a kernel
Kn, we determine their large-
n asymptotics with fixed
0≤q<1 and resum the resulting tail. For
βL=β+it and
βR=β−it, we obtain \begin{equation*} Z_s^{\mathrm{sing}}(β+it,β-it) =s_p c_N \frac{|t|}{2π} \int_{E_{min}}^{E_{max}} e^{-2βE} dE+O(1), \qquad s_p=\begin{cases}2,&4\mid p,\\1,&4\nmid p.\end{cases} \end{equation*} This result reproduces the linear ramp predicted by random matrix theory, including its temperature dependence and symmetry factor, and agrees with the semiclassical predictions. It provides a direct microscopic origin of the ramp within the general
q-deformed quantum algebra. While the plateau lies beyond the scope of the present analysis and calculation.
In this work, we study the spectral form factor of random matrix models which exhibit a large number of degenerate ground states accompanied by a macroscopic gap in the spectrum. The central aim of this work is to understand how the standard narrative about the behavior of the spectral form factor is modified in the presence of these parametrically large number of ground states. We show that, at sufficiently low temperatures, the spectral form factor is dominated by the disconnected contribution, even at arbitrarily late times. Moreover, we demonstrate that the connected form factor only depends on the eigenvalues of the non-degenerate sector, implying that BPS states do not contribute to wormhole calculations in the gravity context. Using the Christoffel-Darboux kernel, we analyze a number of examples including the Bessel model and
N=2 Jackiw-Teitelboim supergravity. In these examples, we find damped oscillations in the disconnected form factor, with a period set by the inverse size of the gap. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the slope of the ramp in the connected form factor arises from a universal sine-kernel, which emerges from a truncation of the full non-perturbative kernel in the
ℏ→0 limit, and find agreement with the leading double trumpet result. Finally, we present predictions for how the ramp will transition to a plateau in the connected form factor and demonstrate how the transition depends on the details of the leading spectral density of states.
We study the saddle points of the SYK model, formulated in terms of the replica bilocal fields, beyond the replica-diagonal assumption. We find a family of replica-nondiagonal saddle points in the IR limit, where the saddle point equations are separable. We use the Parisi ansatz to find the replicanondiagonal solutions and take the replica limit. The free energy on these solutions is computed, and we find that some of the replica-nondiagonal saddles have lower free energy than the replica-diagonal saddle point.
In the large-N limit, we study saddle points of two SYK chains coupled by an interaction that is nonlocal in Euclidean time. We study the free model with the order of the fermionic interaction q = 2 analytically and also investigate the model with interaction in the case q = 4 numerically. We show that in both cases, there is a nontrivial phase structure with an infinite number of phases. Each phase corresponds to a saddle point in the noninteracting two-replica SYK. The nontrivial saddle points have a nonzero value of the replica-nondiagonal correlator in the sense of quasiaveraging if the coupling between replicas is turned off. The nonlocal interaction between replicas thus provides a protocol for turning the nonperturbatively subleading effects in SYK into nonequilibrium configurations that dominate at large N. For comparison, we also study two SYK chains with local interaction for q = 2 and q = 4 . We show that the q= 2 model has a similar phase structure, while the phase structure differs in the q = 4 model, dual to the traversable wormhole.