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arXiv:2410.23397 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Wormhole-induced effective coupling in SYK chains

Pablo Basteiro, Giuseppe Di Giulio, Johanna Erdmenger B, René Meyer, Zhuo-Yu Xian

Published Feb 20, 2025• 4 citations
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Abstract

A bstract Inhomogeneous quantum chains have recently been considered in the context of developing novel discrete realizations of holographic dualities. To advance this programme, we explore the ground states of infinite chains with large number N of Majorana fermions on each site, which interact via on-site q -body Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) couplings, as well as via additional inhomogeneous hopping terms between nearest-neighbour sites. The hopping parameters are either aperiodically or randomly distributed. Our approach unifies techniques to solve SYK-like models in the large N limit with a real-space renormalization group method known as strong-disorder renormalization group (SDRG). We show that the SDRG decimation of SYK dots linked by a strong hopping induces an effective hopping interaction between their neighbouring sites. If two decimated sites are nearest neighbours, in the large q limit their local ground states admit a holographic dual description in terms of eternal traversable wormholes. At the end of the SDRG procedure, we obtain a factorised ground state of the infinite inhomogeneous SYK chains that we consider, which has a spacetime description involving a sequence of wormholes. This amounts to a local near-boundary description of the bulk geometry in the context of discrete holography.

DOI
10.1007/jhep02(2025)142

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Any quantum state is fully specified by the expectation values of a complete set of Hermitian operators. For a system of Majorana fermions, such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, this set of observables can be taken to be all possible strings of Majorana fermion operators. The expectation values of these fermion strings in a thermal state depend erratically on the microscopic couplings that specify the SYK Hamiltonian, and we study their statistical properties directly in the thermodynamic limit using path integral techniques. When the underlying SYK Hamiltonian is chaotic, we find that these expectation values are well-modeled as real Gaussian random variables with zero mean and a variance that we compute. In contrast, for the integrable variant of SYK, we find that the expectation values are actually non-Gaussian. We then use these results to study measures of magic in the SYK thermal state, including the robustness of magic and the stabilizer Rényi entropy. We also show that our results can be quantitatively reproduced with a dual gravity calculation in the chaotic case at sufficiently low temperature. In this dual gravity model the variance of a given microscopic operator string is related to a wormhole geometry stabilized by a massive particle which is dual to the operator string. Our results thus provide a concrete and quantitative setting in which to study the relationship between randomness, wormholes and closed universes, as well as a holographic dual of quantum magic.

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A bstract Inhomogeneous quantum chains have recently been considered in the context of developing novel discrete realizations of holographic dualities. To advance this programme, we explore the ground states of infinite chains with large number N of Majorana fermions on each site, which interact via on-site q -body Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) couplings, as well as via additional inhomogeneous hopping terms between nearest-neighbour sites. The hopping parameters are either aperiodically or randomly distributed. Our approach unifies techniques to solve SYK-like models in the large N limit with a real-space renormalization group method known as strong-disorder renormalization group (SDRG). We show that the SDRG decimation of SYK dots linked by a strong hopping induces an effective hopping interaction between their neighbouring sites. If two decimated sites are nearest neighbours, in the large q limit their local ground states admit a holographic dual description in terms of eternal traversable wormholes. At the end of the SDRG procedure, we obtain a factorised ground state of the infinite inhomogeneous SYK chains that we consider, which has a spacetime description involving a sequence of wormholes. This amounts to a local near-boundary description of the bulk geometry in the context of discrete holography.
Abstract We investigate two sparse Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) systems coupled by a bilinear term as a holographic quantum mechanical description of an eternal traversable wormhole in the low temperature limit. Each SYK system consists of N Majorana fermions coupled by random q-body interactions. The degree of sparseness is captured by a regular hypergraph in such a way that the Hamiltonian contains exactly k N independent terms. We improve on the theoretical understanding of the sparseness property by using known measures of hypergraph expansion. We show that the sparse version of the two coupled SYK model is gapped with a ground state close to a thermofield double state. Using Krylov subspace and parallelization techniques, we simulate the system for q = 4 and q = 8. The sparsity of the model allows us to explore larger values of N than the ones existing in the literature for the all-to-all SYK. We analyze in detail the two-point functions and the transmission amplitude of signals between the two systems. We identify a range of parameters where revivals obey the scaling predicted by holography and signals can be interpreted as traversing the wormhole.
Abstract Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, which describes N randomly interacting Majorana fermions in 0+1 dimension, is found to be an solvable UV-complete toy model for holographic duality in nearly AdS2 dilaton gravity. Ref. [1] proposed a modified model by coupling two identical SYK models, which at low-energy limit is dual to a global AdS2 geometry. This geometry is an “eternal wormhole” because the two boundaries are causally connected. Increasing the temperature drives a Hawking-Page like transition from the eternal wormhole geometry to two disconnected black holes with coupled matter field. To gain more understanding of the coupled SYK model, in this work, we study the finite temperature spectral function of this system by numerical solving the Schwinger-Dyson equation in real-time. We find in the low-temperature phase the system is well described by weakly interacting fermions with renormalized single-particle gap, while in the high temperature phase the system is strongly interacting and the single-particle peaks merge. We also study the q dependence of the spectral function.
Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, which describes N randomly interacting Majorana fermions in 0+1 dimension, is found to be an solvable UV-complete toy model for holographic duality in nearly AdS2 dilaton gravity. Ref. [1] proposed a modified model by coupling two identical SYK models, which at low-energy limit is dual to a global AdS2 geometry. This geometry is an “eternal wormhole" because the two boundaries are causally connected. Increasing the temperature drives a Hawking-Page like transition from the eternal wormhole geometry to two disconnected black holes with coupled matter field. To gain more understanding of the coupled SYK model, in this work, we study the finite temperature spectral function of this system by numerical solving the Schwinger-Dyson equation in real-time. We find in the low-temperature phase the system is well described by weakly interacting fermions with renormalized single-particle gap, while in the high temperature phase the system is strongly interacting and the single-particle peaks merge. We also study the q dependence of the spectral function.
We construct an emergent holographic dual description in the Luttinger-Ward functional approach, where the renormalization group (RG) flows of collective bi-local fields appear manifestly in the bulk effective action with an emergent extra dimension. This holographic dual effective field theory reproduces 1/N1/N1/N quantum corrections in a self-consistent manner when we take the UV limit in the bulk effective action. Going into the IR regime in the extra dimension, we observe that a partial class of the field theoretic 1/N1/N1/N, 1/N21/N^{2}1/N2, ... quantum corrections are resummed in the all-loop order and reorganized to form a holographic dual effective field theory in a large NNN fashion living on the one-higher dimensional spacetime. In this study, we apply this theoretical framework into an Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. Taking the large NNN limit in the holographic dual effective field theory, we obtain nonlinearly coupled second-order bulk differential equations of motion for the three bi-local order-parameter fields of fermion self-energy, Green's function, and polarization function. Here, both UV and IR boundary conditions are derived self-consistently from the boundary effective action. We solve these highly intertwined nonlinear differential equations based on the so called matching method. Our ansatz for the bi-local order-parameter fields coincide with the conformally invariant solution of the field theoretic large NNN limit in the UV limit, but their overall coefficients RG−flowRG-flowRG−flow along the extra dimensional space, respectively, reflecting effects of higher-order quantum corrections. As a result, we find an insulating behavior, where the self-energy diverges at IR. ...
Recent work has shown that coupling two identical Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models can realize a phase of matter that is holographically dual to an eternal traversable wormhole.This phase supports revival oscillations between two quantum chaotic systems that can be interpreted as information traversing the wormhole.Here we generalize these ideas to a pair of coupled SYK models with complex fermions that respect a global U(1) charge symmetry.Such models show richer behavior than conventional SYK models with Majorana fermions and may be easier to realize experimentally.We consider two different couplings, namely, tunneling and charge-conserving two-body interactions, and obtain the corresponding phase diagram using a combination of numerical and analytical techniques.At low temperature, we find a charge-neutral gapped phase that supports revival oscillations, with a ground state close to the thermofield double, which we argue is dual to a traversable wormhole.We also find two different gapless non-Fermi liquid phases with tunable charge density which we interpret as dual to a "large" and "small" charged black hole.The gapped and gapless phases are separated by a first-order phase transition of the Hawking-Page type.Finally, we discuss an SU(2)-symmetric limit of our model that is closely related to proposed realizations of SYK physics with spinful fermions in graphene, and explain its relevance for future experiments on this system.
Any quantum state is fully specified by the expectation values of a complete set of Hermitian operators. For a system of Majorana fermions, such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, this set of observables can be taken to be all possible strings of Majorana fermion operators. The expectation values of these fermion strings in a thermal state depend erratically on the microscopic couplings that specify the SYK Hamiltonian, and we study their statistical properties directly in the thermodynamic limit using path integral techniques. When the underlying SYK Hamiltonian is chaotic, we find that these expectation values are well-modeled as real Gaussian random variables with zero mean and a variance that we compute. In contrast, for the integrable variant of SYK, we find that the expectation values are actually non-Gaussian. We then use these results to study measures of magic in the SYK thermal state, including the robustness of magic and the stabilizer Rényi entropy. We also show that our results can be quantitatively reproduced with a dual gravity calculation in the chaotic case at sufficiently low temperature. In this dual gravity model the variance of a given microscopic operator string is related to a wormhole geometry stabilized by a massive particle which is dual to the operator string. Our results thus provide a concrete and quantitative setting in which to study the relationship between randomness, wormholes and closed universes, as well as a holographic dual of quantum magic.