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arXiv:2403.03457 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Scrambling transition in free fermion systems induced by a single impurity

Qu-Cheng Gao, Tianci Zhou, Pengfei Zhang, Xiao Chen

Published Dec 3, 2024• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In quantum many-body systems, interactions play a crucial role in the emergence of information scrambling. When particles interact throughout the system, the entanglement between them can lead to a rapid and chaotic spreading of quantum information, typically probed by the growth in operator size in the Heisenberg picture. In this study, we explore whether the operator undergoes scrambling when particles interact solely through a single impurity in generic spatial dimensions, focusing on fermion systems with spatial and temporal random hoppings. By connecting the dynamics of the operator to the symmetric exclusion process with a source term, we demonstrate the presence of an escape-to-scrambling transition when tuning the interaction strength for fermions in three dimensions. As a comparison, systems in lower dimensions are proven to scramble at arbitrarily weak interactions unless the hopping becomes sufficiently long-ranged. Our predictions are validated using both a Brownian circuit with a single Majorana fermion per site and a solvable Brownian SYK model with a large local Hilbert space dimension. This suggests the universality of the theoretical picture for free fermion systems with spatial and temporal randomness.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.110.235110

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In quantum many-body systems, interactions play a crucial role in the emergence of information scrambling. When particles interact throughout the system, the entanglement between them can lead to a rapid and chaotic spreading of quantum information, typically probed by the growth in operator size in the Heisenberg picture. In this study, we explore whether the operator undergoes scrambling when particles interact solely through a single impurity in generic spatial dimensions, focusing on fermion systems with spatial and temporal random hoppings. By connecting the dynamics of the operator to the symmetric exclusion process with a source term, we demonstrate the presence of an escape-to-scrambling transition when tuning the interaction strength for fermions in three dimensions. As a comparison, systems in lower dimensions are proven to scramble at arbitrarily weak interactions unless the hopping becomes sufficiently long-ranged. Our predictions are validated using both a Brownian circuit with a single Majorana fermion per site and a solvable Brownian SYK model with a large local Hilbert space dimension. This suggests the universality of the theoretical picture for free fermion systems with spatial and temporal randomness.
It is well established that the presence of single impurity can have a substantial impact on the transport properties of quantum many-body systems at low temperature. In this work, we investigate a close analog of this problem from the perspective of quantum information dynamics. We construct Brownian circuits and Clifford circuits consisting of a free fermion hopping term and a sole interaction. In both circuits, our findings reveal the emergence of operator scrambling. Notably, the growth of the operator can be mapped to the symmetric exclusion process in the presence of a source term localized at a single point. We demonstrate that in the one-dimensional system, both the operator and entanglement exhibit diffusive scaling. Conversely, in scenarios characterized by all-to-all hopping, the operator's size undergoes exponential growth, while the entanglement exhibits a linear increase over time.
We study impurity-induced particle growth and scrambling in clean one-dimensional free-fermion systems. We show that a single local impurity can act as a branching source: particle or operator weight propagates coherently into the free bulk, returns to the impurity, and is locally converted into additional degrees of freedom. We develop this branching picture in three complementary settings: a monitored free-fermion model with feedback, a fully unitary interacting particle model, and Heisenberg operator dynamics with an interacting impurity. In the monitored model, we find a feedback-driven transition for both boundary and bulk impurities. In the unitary particle and operator models, a boundary impurity gives rise to an analogous transition from saturation to sustained growth and scrambling. These results reveal how a single impurity can generate complex many-body dynamics in an otherwise clean and free quantum system.
Abstract In generic closed quantum systems, the complexity of operators increases under time evolution governed by the Heisenberg equation, reflecting the scrambling of local quantum information. However, when systems interact with an external environment, the system-environment coupling allows operators to escape from the system, inducing a dynamical transition between the scrambling phase and the dissipative phase. This transition is known as the environment-induced information scrambling transition, originally proposed in Majorana fermion systems. In this work, we advance this discovery by investigating the transition in charge-conserved systems with space-time randomness. We construct solvable Brownian Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models of complex fermions coupled to an environment, enabling the analytical computation of operator growth. We determine the critical dissipation strength, which is proportional to n(1−n)n(1-n)n(1−n) n ( 1 - n ) with n being the density of the complex fermions, arising from the suppression in the quantum Lyapunova exponent due to the Pauli blockade in the scattering process. We further analyze the density dependence of maximally scrambled operators at late time. Our results shed light on the intriguing interplay between information scrambling, dissipation, and conservation laws.
In closed generic many-body systems, unitary evolution disperses local quantum information into highly nonlocal objects, resulting in thermalization. Such a process is called information scrambling, whose swiftness is quantified by the operator size growth. However, the impact of couplings to the environment on the process of information scrambling remains unexplored for quantum systems embedded within an environment. Here we predict a dynamical transition in quantum systems with all-to-all interactions accompanied by an environment, which separates two phases. In the dissipative phase, information scrambling halts as the operator size decays with time, while in the scrambling phase, dispersion of information persists, and the operator size grows and saturates to an O(N) value in the long-time limit with N the number of degrees of freedom of the systems. The transition is driven by the competition between the system's intrinsic and environment propelled scramblings and the environment-induced dissipation. Our prediction is derived from a general argument based on epidemiological models and demonstrated analytically via solvable Brownian Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models. We provide further evidence which suggests that the transition is generic to quantum chaotic systems when coupled to an environment. Our study sheds light on the fundamental behavior of quantum systems in the presence of an environment.
Information scrambling is a hallmark of quantum chaos and thermalization in isolated quantum many-body systems. We investigate scrambling dynamics in the all-to-all interacting spin Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK)-qqq model using both pure- and mixed-state entanglement measures. We show that von-Neumann and Rényi entropies exhibit rapid growth followed by saturation near Haar-random values, signaling efficient scrambling. The scrambling rate reveals a nontrivial dependence on the interaction order, system size, and Hamiltonian scaling. We further employ mixed-state entanglement as a powerful probe of information scrambling. We numerically find a universal relation between the Rényi-1/2 mutual information and entanglement negativity for minimal interaction order in the early growth regime. Furthermore, entanglement negativity displays a Page-curve-like behavior under unequal subsystem partitioning, characterized by the birth, spread, and eventual death of quantum correlations. Our results provide a generic description of information scrambling using entanglement dynamics in all-to-all interacting spin systems with multi-body interactions.
We study the role of randomness in the scrambling of quantum information within integrable free-fermionic systems. Considering quadratic Hamiltonians with varying degrees of randomness, we analyze entanglement-based measures to characterize the scrambling structure. We show that the memory effect in the entanglement of disjoint subsystems of Gaussian states vanishes when the local couplings are random, indicating information delocalization. The tripartite mutual information exhibits negative saturation values similar to those in chaotic systems, albeit with a smaller magnitude, revealing weaker scrambling under integrable quadratic dynamics. Despite integrability, spectral analyses reveal that local random models display a spectral-form-factor ramp and a partial crossover in the single-particle level-spacing ratio from Poisson-like to Wigner--Dyson-like behavior within a certain range of random couplings. These results demonstrate that randomness can act as a minimal ingredient for inducing information scrambling in integrable quadratic fermionic models.