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arXiv:2412.14280 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Many-body spectral transitions through the lens of a variable-range quadratic Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model

Andrea Legramandi, Soumik Bandyopadhyay, Philipp Hauke

Published Mar 30, 2026• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a cornerstone in the study of quantum chaos and holographic quantum matter. Real-world implementations, however, deviate from the idealized all-to-all connectivity, raising questions about the robustness of its chaotic properties. In this work, we investigate a quadratic SYK model with distance-dependent interactions governed by a power-law decay. By analytically and numerically studying the spectral form factor (SFF), we uncover how transitions present in the single-particle limit carry over to the many-body system. Nontrivial cancellations in the one-loop contributions lead to a robustness of the SFF under a considerable reduction of the interaction range. Further suppression leads to a breakdown of perturbation theory around the infinite-range path-integral saddle and the appearance of spectral regimes, marked by a higher dip and the emergence of a secondary plateau. Our results highlight the interplay between single-particle criticality and many-body dynamics, offering insights into the quantum chaos-to-localization transition and its reflection in spectral statistics.

DOI
10.1103/49yw-h27c

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The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a cornerstone in the study of quantum chaos and holographic quantum matter. Real-world implementations, however, deviate from the idealized all-to-all connectivity, raising questions about the robustness of its chaotic properties. In this work, we investigate a quadratic SYK model with distance-dependent interactions governed by a power-law decay. By analytically and numerically studying the spectral form factor (SFF), we uncover how transitions present in the single-particle limit carry over to the many-body system. Nontrivial cancellations in the one-loop contributions lead to a robustness of the SFF under a considerable reduction of the interaction range. Further suppression leads to a breakdown of perturbation theory around the infinite-range path-integral saddle and the appearance of spectral regimes, marked by a higher dip and the emergence of a secondary plateau. Our results highlight the interplay between single-particle criticality and many-body dynamics, offering insights into the quantum chaos-to-localization transition and its reflection in spectral statistics.
Quantum chaos is one of the distinctive features of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, N Majorana fermions in 0+1 dimensions with infinite-range two-body interactions, which is attracting a lot of interest as a toy model for holography. Here we show analytically and numerically that a generalized SYK model with an additional one-body infinite-range random interaction, which is a relevant perturbation in the infrared, is still quantum chaotic and retains most of its holographic features for a fixed value of the perturbation and sufficiently high temperature. However, a chaotic-integrable transition, characterized by the vanishing of the Lyapunov exponent and spectral correlations given by Poisson statistics, occurs at a temperature that depends on the strength of the perturbation. We speculate about the gravity dual of this transition.
A bstract The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a system of N Majorana fermions with random interactions and strongly chaotic dynamics, which at low energy admits a holographically dual description as two-dimensional Jackiw-Teitelboim gravity. Hence the SYK model provides a toy model of quantum gravity that might be feasible to simulate with near-term quantum hardware. Motivated by the goal of reducing the resources needed for such a simulation, we study a sparsified version of the SYK model, in which interaction terms are deleted with probability 1 −p . Specifically, we compute numerically the spectral form factor (SFF, the Fourier transform of the Hamiltonian’s eigenvalue pair correlation function) and the nearest-neighbor eigenvalue gap ratio r (characterizing the distribution of gaps between consecutive eigenvalues). We find that when p is greater than a transition value p 1 , which scales as 1/ N 3 , both the SFF and r match the values attained by the full unsparsified model and with expectations from random matrix theory (RMT). But for p < p 1 , deviations from unsparsified SYK and RMT occur, indicating a breakdown of holography in the highly sparsified regime. Below an even smaller value p 2 , which also scales as 1/ N 3 , even the spacing of consecutive eigenvalues differs from RMT values, signaling a complete breakdown of spectral rigidity. Our results cast doubt on the holographic interpretation of very highly sparsified SYK models obtained via machine learning using teleportation infidelity as a loss function.
Understanding how quantum systems transition from integrable to fully chaotic behavior remains a central open problem in physics. The Sachdev--Ye--Kitaev (SYK) model provides a paradigmatic framework for studying many-body chaos and holography, yet it captures only the strongly correlated limit, leaving intermediate regimes unexplored. Here, we investigate the Yukawa--SYK (YSYK) model, where bosonic fields mediate random fermionic interactions, and demonstrate that it naturally bridges single-particle and many-body chaos. Using spectral and dynamical chaos markers, we perform a comprehensive finite-size characterization of the YSYK model. We show that the interaction strength acts as a tunable control parameter interpolating between the SYK2_22​ and SYK4_44​ limits, and introduce a framework enabling direct and quantitative comparison with these benchmark models. In the intermediate regimes, we uncover distinct dynamical regimes marked by partial ergodicity breaking, prethermalization plateaus, and incomplete scrambling. Finally, we propose a feasible optical-cavity implementation of the YSYK model using ultra-cold atoms. Our results establish the YSYK model as a unifying platform connecting single-particle and many-body chaos, paving the way for experimental observation of these phenomena.
A bstract Understanding the emergence of complex correlations in strongly interacting systems remains a fundamental challenge in quantum many-body physics. One fruitful approach is to develop solvable toy models that encapsulate universal properties shared by realistic systems. In this work, we introduce the Brownian SYK-Hubbard model, which combines the all-to-all random interactions of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with on-site Hubbard-type interactions. This hybrid construction enables the study of the interplay between nonlocal random dynamics and local correlation effects: (1) As the interaction strength increases, the single-particle spectrum exhibits a transition from a single peak to a two-peak structure, signaling the onset of Mottness. (2) The spectral form factor undergoes a sequence of dynamical transitions as the evolution time increases before reaching the plateau in the long-time limit under strong Hubbard interactions. (3) The out-of-time-order correlator is computed by summing a series of modified ladder diagrams, which determines the quantum Lyapunov exponent and reveals a violation of the bound on branching time. Our results establish a new analytically tractable platform for exploring the effects of Hubbard interactions in chaotic many-body systems.
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.
We study level statistics of a generalized Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with two-body and one-body random interactions of finite range by exact diagonalization. Tuning the range of the one-body term, while keeping the two-body interaction sufficiently long ranged, does not alter substantially the spectral correlations, which are still given by the random matrix prediction typical of a quantum chaotic system. However, a transition to an insulating state, characterized by Poisson statistics, is observed by reducing the range of the two-body interaction. Close to the many-body metal-insulator transition, we show that spectral correlations share all features previously found in systems at the Anderson transition and in the proximity of the many-body localization transition. Our results suggest the potential relevance of SYK models in the context of many-body localization. It also offers a starting point for the exploration of a gravity dual of this phenomenon which we speculate to be related to the Hawking-Page transition.