Abstract Quantum chaos is usually characterized through its statistical implications on the energy spectrum of a given system. In this work we propose a decoherent mechanism for sensing quantum chaos. The chaotic nature of a many-body quantum system is sensed by studying the implications that it produces in the long-time dynamics of a probe coupled to it under a dephasing interaction. By introducing the notion of an effective averaged decoherence factor, we show that the correction to the geometric phase acquired by the probe with respect to its unitary evolution can be exploited as a robust tool for sensing the integrable to chaos transition of the many-body quantum system to which it is coupled. This sensing mechanism is verified for several systems with different types of symmetries, disorder and even in the presence of long-range interactions, evidencing its universality.
Abstract Quantum chaos is usually characterized through its statistical implications on the energy spectrum of a given system. In this work we propose a decoherent mechanism for sensing quantum chaos. The chaotic nature of a many-body quantum system is sensed by studying the implications that it produces in the long-time dynamics of a probe coupled to it under a dephasing interaction. By introducing the notion of an effective averaged decoherence factor, we show that the correction to the geometric phase acquired by the probe with respect to its unitary evolution can be exploited as a robust tool for sensing the integrable to chaos transition of the many-body quantum system to which it is coupled. This sensing mechanism is verified for several systems with different types of symmetries, disorder and even in the presence of long-range interactions, evidencing its universality.
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.
Quantum chaos concerns the emergence of universal statistical and dynamical prop- erties in quantum systems whose classical counterparts exhibit chaotic behavior. Unlike classical chaos, which can be characterized by sensitivity to initial conditions and exponential divergence of trajectories, quantum chaos manifests itself through a variety of indirect diagnostics, including spectral correlations, operator growth, and information scrambling. Understanding how these signatures arise from microscopic dynamics, and how they can be accessed in realistic many-body systems, is a central challenge in modern physics. This thesis investigates quantum chaos from complementary theoretical and practical perspectives. On the theoretical side, it develops effective descriptions of chaotic dy- namics in many-body systems with approximate symmetries, focusing on how weak symmetry breaking controls the exploration of Hilbert space and the crossover to random-matrix universality. Using perturbative arguments, numerical simulations, and a nonlinear sigma-model formulation, we identify a regime of Hilbert-space dif- fusion in which chaotic dynamics unfolds through a slow, collective spreading across nearly decoupled symmetry sectors. On the practical side, the thesis addresses the question of how paradigmatic chaotic models can be realized and probed in controlled experimental platforms. In partic- ular, it explores quantum simulation schemes for Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) models using cavity quantum electrodynamics. By employing time-dependent disorder and Trotterized evolution in single-mode optical cavities, we demonstrate how low-rank interactions can be systematically promoted to effective all-to-all randomness, re- producing the spectral and dynamical signatures of SYK physics. Extensions to open-system dynamics are discussed, including Lindbladian realizations and the role of dissipation. The thesis thus highlights the connections between effective descriptions of quantum chaos and their implementation in controlled quantum simulation settings.
The spectral form factor (SFF), which is the Fourier transform of the two-point spectral correlation, is a fundamental diagnostics of quantum chaos. Nevertheless, its experimental detection in quantum many-body systems was less unexplored until recently. Here, we establish a relationship between the SFF with the quantum Fisher information (QFI) by means of quantum sensing protocols. Furthermore, when the eigenvalues and eigenstates of the disordered Hamiltonian are statistically independent, we prove that QFI is typical both in short and long timescales while numerics suggest that it is also typical at intermediate timescales, which ensures self-averaging of QFI. The self-averaging property renders the experimental measurement of QFI with our protocol less noisy in contrast with the direct measurement of SFF which is known to be non-self-averaging. Our results reveal an intriguing connection between quantum noise and the signatures of quantum chaos.
We study the ultimate limits to the decoherence rate associated with dephasing processes. Fluctuating chaotic quantum systems are shown to exhibit extreme decoherence, with a rate that scales exponentially with the particle number, thus exceeding the polynomial dependence of systems with fluctuating k-body interactions. Our findings suggest the use of quantum chaotic systems as a natural test bed for spontaneous wave function collapse models. We further discuss the implications on the decoherence of AdS/CFT black holes resulting from the unitarity loss associated with energy dephasing.
The physics of quantum chaos and diffusive transport is typically studied in settings with microscopic disorder or many-body interactions. In this Letter, we demonstrate that these phenomena can arise purely from geometric randomness. By studying non-interacting quantum particles on random locally tree-like layered graphs with uniform couplings, we show that the geometric randomness and effective graph dimensionality dictates the presence of chaotic dynamics or lack thereof. These graphs can be considered as structurally disordered generalisations of regular square lattices or ladders, or equivalently as multi-component one-dimensional chains with random links between the components. We find that an extensive layer size yields robust quantum chaos, level repulsion, and diffusive transport. Conversely, in the quasi-one-dimensional limit, we find the coexistence of extensive number of localised and delocalised states -- this leads to suppressed level repulsion accompanied by the latter driving ballistic transport. These results establish geometric randomness as a fundamental and independent mechanism for generating and tuning quantum chaos.
We study the ultimate limits to the decoherence rate associated with dephasing processes. Fluctuating chaotic quantum systems are shown to exhibit extreme decoherence, with a rate that scales exponentially with the particle number, thus exceeding the polynomial dependence of systems with fluctuating k-body interactions. Our findings suggest the use of quantum chaotic systems as a natural test-bed for spontaneous wave function collapse models. We further discuss the implications on the decoherence of AdS/CFT black holes resulting from the unitarity loss associated with energy dephasing.