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arXiv:2412.20182 · Physical review. E

Anatomy of information scrambling and decoherence in the integrable Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model

Antonio M. Garcı́a-Garcı́a, Chang Liu, Lucas Sá, J. J. M. Verbaarschot, Jie Zheng

Published Sep 12, 2025• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The growth of information scrambling, captured by out-of-time-order correlation functions (OTOCs), is a central indicator of the nature of many-body quantum dynamics. Here, we compute analytically the complete time dependence of the OTOC for an integrable Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, N Majoranas with random two-body interactions of infinite range, coupled to a Markovian bath at finite temperature. In the limit of no coupling to the bath, the time evolution of scrambling experiences different stages. For t≲sqrt[N], after an initial polynomial growth, the OTOC approaches saturation in a power-law fashion with oscillations superimposed. At t∼sqrt[N], the OTOC reverses trend and starts to decrease linearly in time. The reason for this linear decrease is that, despite being a subleading 1/N effect, the OTOC in this region is governed by the spectral form factor of the antisymmetric couplings of the SYK model. The linear decrease stops at t∼2N, the Heisenberg time, where saturation occurs. The effect of the environment is an overall exponential decay of the OTOC for times longer than the inverse of the coupling strength to the bath. The oscillations at t≲sqrt[N] indicate lack of thermalization-a desired feature for better performance of quantum information devices.

DOI
10.1103/j589-dszc

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A closed quantum system never forgets its initial state, but the encoded information can get scrambled and become inaccessible without measuring a large fraction of all the system degrees of freedom. This scrambling can be diagnosed by studying the spatial spreading of initially local operators under the Heisenberg time evolution, and the decay of the out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC). What insights can OTOCs provide to understand the dynamics of quantum many-body systems? What are the characteristic behaviors of OTOCs during the time evolution? How is information scrambling affected by the dissipation in open quantum many-body systems? We first study slow scrambling in many-body localized systems via calculating various correlators, two-point retarded correlators and OTOCs. Comparing with retarded correlators, OTOCs provide more information about the dynamics. We find that disorder slows and partially halts the onset of information scrambling. Instead of ballistic spreading, propagation of information forms a logarithmic light cone. Next, we study the finite-size scaling of OTOCs at late times in generic thermalizing quantum many-body systems. When energy is conserved, the late-time saturation value of the OTOC of generic traceless local operators scales as an inverse polynomial in the system size. This is in contrast to the inverse exponential scaling expected for chaotic dynamics without energy conservation. We also study information scrambling in open quantum many-body systems. We define a dissipative version of OTOC and study its behaviors in a prototypical chaotic quantum chain with dissipation. We find that dissipation leads to not only the overall decay of the scrambled information due to leaking, but also structural changes so that the information light cone can only reach a finite distance even when the effect of overall decay is removed. Finally, we construct a family of local Hamiltonians for understanding the asymmetric information scrambling. Our models live on a one-dimensional lattice and exhibit asymmetric butterfly light cone between the left and right spatial directions.

•Feb 28, 2020•5 citations
The growth of information scrambling, captured by out-of-time-order correlation functions (OTOCs), is a central indicator of the nature of many-body quantum dynamics. Here, we compute analytically the complete time dependence of the OTOC for an integrable Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, N Majoranas with random two-body interactions of infinite range, coupled to a Markovian bath at finite temperature. In the limit of no coupling to the bath, the time evolution of scrambling experiences different stages. For t≲sqrt[N], after an initial polynomial growth, the OTOC approaches saturation in a power-law fashion with oscillations superimposed. At t∼sqrt[N], the OTOC reverses trend and starts to decrease linearly in time. The reason for this linear decrease is that, despite being a subleading 1/N effect, the OTOC in this region is governed by the spectral form factor of the antisymmetric couplings of the SYK model. The linear decrease stops at t∼2N, the Heisenberg time, where saturation occurs. The effect of the environment is an overall exponential decay of the OTOC for times longer than the inverse of the coupling strength to the bath. The oscillations at t≲sqrt[N] indicate lack of thermalization-a desired feature for better performance of quantum information devices.
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model attracts attention in the context of information scrambling, which represents delocalization of quantum information and is quantified by the out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC). The SYK model contains NNN fermions with disordered and four-body interactions. Here, we introduce a variant of the SYK model, which we refer to as the Wishart SYK model. We investigate the Wishart SYK model for complex fermions and that for hard-core bosons. We show that the ground state of the Wishart SYK model is massively degenerate and the residual entropy is extensive, and that the Wishart SYK model for complex fermions is integrable. In addition, we numerically investigate the OTOC and level statistics of the SYK models. At late times, the OTOC of the fermionic Wishart SYK model exhibits large temporal fluctuations, in contrast with smooth scrambling in the original SYK model. We argue that the large temporal fluctuations of the OTOC are a consequence of a small effective dimension of the initial state. We also show that the level statistics of the fermionic Wishart SYK model is in agreement with the Poisson distribution, while the bosonic Wishart SYK model obeys the gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE) or the gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE) distribution.
Abstract Out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) have emerged as the preeminent theoretical and experimental probe of quantum information scrambling — the delocalization of quantum information across many-body degrees of freedom. Here we present a comprehensive computational study of OTOCs across three paradigmatic models: the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, the non-integrable transverse-field Ising chain, and random unitary circuits. Through exact diagonalization and large-N analytics, we extract Lyapunov exponents, scrambling times, and butterfly velocities, demonstrating that all chaotic systems studied approach, but do not saturate, the Maldacena-Shenker-Stanford (MSS) bound λ_L ≤ 2π/β. Crucially, we introduce the Spectral Out-of-Time-Order Correlator (SOTOC), a novel frequency-domain diagnostic that decomposes information scrambling into its constituent spectral modes. The SOTOC achieves a 32% improvement in Lyapunov exponent extraction precision over conventional log-linear fitting and maintains robust performance at noise levels σ > 0.30, where traditional methods fail. Our phase diagram reveals a sharp transition in scrambling dynamics at h/J ≈ 1.0 in the TFIM, coinciding with the onset of quantum chaos as measured by level-spacing statistics. These results establish SOTOC as a practical and theoretically grounded tool for probing scrambling in near-term quantum devices and holographic systems.
The delocalization or scrambling of quantum information has emerged as a central ingredient in the understanding of thermalization in isolated quantum many-body systems. Recently, significant progress has been made analytically by modeling non-integrable systems as periodically driven systems, lacking a Hamiltonian picture, while honest Hamiltonian dynamics are frequently limited to small system sizes due to computational constraints. In this paper, we address this by investigating the role of conservation laws (including energy conservation) in the thermalization process from an information-theoretic perspective. For general non-integrable models, we use the equilibrium approximation to show that the maximal amount of information is scrambled (as measured by the tripartite mutual information of the time-evolution operator) at late times even when a system conserves energy. In contrast, we explicate how when a system has additional symmetries that lead to degeneracies in the spectrum, the amount of information scrambled must decrease. This general theory is exemplified in case studies of holographic conformal field theories (CFTs) and the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. Due to the large Virasoro symmetry in 1+1D CFTs, we argue that, in a sense, these holographic theories are not maximally chaotic, which is explicitly seen by the non-saturation of the second Rényi tripartite mutual information. The roles of particle-hole and U(1) symmetries in the SYK model are milder due to the degeneracies being only two-fold, which we confirm explicitly at both large- and small-N. We reinterpret the operator entanglement in terms of the growth of local operators, connecting our results with the information scrambling described by out-of-time-ordered correlators, identifying the mechanism for suppressed scrambling from the Heisenberg perspective.
We introduce two disorder-free variants of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, demonstrate their integrability, and study their static and dynamical properties. Unlike diagrammatic techniques, the integrability of these models allows us to obtain dynamical correlation functions even when the number of Majorana fermions is finite. From the solutions, we find that out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) in these models exhibit exponential growth at early times, resembling that of many-body quantum chaotic systems, such as those with disorder or external kick terms, despite their large N behavior differing from that of typical chaotic systems. Conversely, our analysis shows no evidence of random-matrix behavior in level spacing statistics or the spectral form factor. Our findings illustrate that the clean versions of the SYK models represent simple but nontrivial examples of disorder-free quantum many-body systems displaying chaoslike behavior of OTOCs.
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.
A closed quantum system never forgets its initial state, but the encoded information can get scrambled and become inaccessible without measuring a large fraction of all the system degrees of freedom. This scrambling can be diagnosed by studying the spatial spreading of initially local operators under the Heisenberg time evolution, and the decay of the out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC). What insights can OTOCs provide to understand the dynamics of quantum many-body systems? What are the characteristic behaviors of OTOCs during the time evolution? How is information scrambling affected by the dissipation in open quantum many-body systems? We first study slow scrambling in many-body localized systems via calculating various correlators, two-point retarded correlators and OTOCs. Comparing with retarded correlators, OTOCs provide more information about the dynamics. We find that disorder slows and partially halts the onset of information scrambling. Instead of ballistic spreading, propagation of information forms a logarithmic light cone. Next, we study the finite-size scaling of OTOCs at late times in generic thermalizing quantum many-body systems. When energy is conserved, the late-time saturation value of the OTOC of generic traceless local operators scales as an inverse polynomial in the system size. This is in contrast to the inverse exponential scaling expected for chaotic dynamics without energy conservation. We also study information scrambling in open quantum many-body systems. We define a dissipative version of OTOC and study its behaviors in a prototypical chaotic quantum chain with dissipation. We find that dissipation leads to not only the overall decay of the scrambled information due to leaking, but also structural changes so that the information light cone can only reach a finite distance even when the effect of overall decay is removed. Finally, we construct a family of local Hamiltonians for understanding the asymmetric information scrambling. Our models live on a one-dimensional lattice and exhibit asymmetric butterfly light cone between the left and right spatial directions.