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arXiv:2511.03775 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Variations on a Theme of Krylov

Vijay Balasubramanian, Pawel Caputa, Joan Simón

hep-thcond-mat.stat-mechquant-phSubmitted Nov 5, 2025• Announced Nov 7, 2025• 7 citations• Revised Nov 18, 2025 (v2)
v1 · Nov 5, 2025v2 · Nov 18, 2025
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Abstract

Spread complexity uses the distribution of support of a time-evolving state in the Krylov basis to quantify dispersal across accessible dimensions of a Hilbert space. Here, we describe how variations in initial conditions, the Hamiltonian, and the dimension of the Hilbert space affect spread complexity and Krylov basis structure. We introduce Koherence, the entropy of coherence between perturbed and unperturbed Krylov bases, which can, e.g., quantify dynamical amplification of differences in initial conditions in chaos. To illustrate, we show that dynamics on SL(2,R), SU(2), and Heisenberg-Weyl group manifolds, often used as paradigmatic settings for contrasting chaotic and integrable (semi-)classical behavior, display distinctively different responses to variations of the initial state or Hamiltonian. We then describe a lattice model that displays linear growth of spread complexity, saturating for bounded lattices and continuing forever in a thermodynamic limit. The latter example illustrates a breakdown of continuum/classical effective descriptions of complexity growth in bounded quantum systems.

Comments
66 pages, 16 figures, v2 citation added

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Spread complexity uses the distribution of support of a time-evolving state in the Krylov basis to quantify dispersal across accessible dimensions of a Hilbert space. Here, we describe how variations in initial conditions, the Hamiltonian, and the dimension of the Hilbert space affect spread complexity and Krylov basis structure. We introduce Koherence, the entropy of coherence between perturbed and unperturbed Krylov bases, which can, e.g., quantify dynamical amplification of differences in initial conditions in chaos. To illustrate, we show that dynamics on SL(2,R), SU(2), and Heisenberg-Weyl group manifolds, often used as paradigmatic settings for contrasting chaotic and integrable (semi-)classical behavior, display distinctively different responses to variations of the initial state or Hamiltonian. We then describe a lattice model that displays linear growth of spread complexity, saturating for bounded lattices and continuing forever in a thermodynamic limit. The latter example illustrates a breakdown of continuum/classical effective descriptions of complexity growth in bounded quantum systems.
Abstract Krylov complexity measures the spread of the wavefunction in the Krylov basis, which is constructed using the Hamiltonian and an initial state. We investigate the evolution of the maximally entangled state in the Krylov basis for both chaotic and non-chaotic systems. For this purpose, we derive an Ehrenfest theorem for the Krylov complexity, which reveals its close relation to the spectrum. Our findings suggest that neither the linear growth nor the saturation of Krylov complexity is necessarily associated with chaos. However, for chaotic systems, we observe a universal rise-slope-ramp-plateau behavior in the transition probability from the initial state to one of the Krylov basis states. Moreover, a long ramp in the transition probability is a signal for spectral rigidity, characterizing quantum chaos. Also, this ramp is directly responsible for the late-time peak of Krylov complexity observed in the literature. On the other hand, for non-chaotic systems, this long ramp is absent. Therefore, our results help to clarify which features of the wave function time evolution in Krylov space characterize chaos. We exemplify this by considering the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with two-body or four-body interactions.
Krylov complexity, a quantum complexity measure which uniquely characterizes the spread of a quantum state or an operator, has recently been studied in the context of quantum chaos. However, the definitiveness of this measure as a chaos quantifier is in question in light of its strong dependence on the initial condition. This article clarifies the connection between the Krylov complexity dynamics and the initial operator or state. We find that the saturation value of Krylov complexity depends monotonically on the inverse participation ratio (IPR) of the initial condition in the eigenbasis of the Hamiltonian. We explain the reversal of the complexity saturation levels observed in [Phys. Rev. E 107, 024217 (2023)2470-004510.1103/PhysRevE.107.024217] using the initial spread of the operator in the Hamiltonian eigenbasis. IPR dependence is present even in the fully chaotic regime, where popular quantifiers of chaos, such as out-of-time-ordered correlators and entanglement generation, show similar behavior regardless of the initial condition. Krylov complexity averaged over many initial conditions still does not characterize chaos.
Krylov state complexity, or spread complexity, has emerged as a sharp and versatile diagnostic of quantum chaos, information spreading, and many-body dynamics. Built from the Lanczos algorithm and grounded in the optimal-basis theorem, Krylov complexity thereby provides a robust spectroscopic window into quantum dynamics. A central theme is the characteristic overshoot observed in chaotic systems: a complexity peak in which chaotic evolution drives the state deeper into the Krylov chain than in integrable systems before relaxing to equilibrium. This behavior, tied to random-matrix universality classes of spectral statistics, is illustrated across a broad range of models, including quantum billiards, quantum spin chains, and variants of the SYK model. We also discuss proposed holographic descriptions of Krylov complexity in Einstein gravity, and conclude by outlining future directions and open problems, including time-dependent systems and quantum-field-theoretic formulations. A Mathematica notebook is provided for numerical exploration of Krylov complexity and spectral statistics across models.
A central problem in formulating a theory of quantum gravity is to determine the size and structure of the Hilbert space of black holes. Here we use a quantum dynamical Krylov complexity approach to calculate the Hilbert space dimension of a black hole in 2+1-dimensional Anti-de Sitter space. We achieve this by obtaining the spread of an initial thermofield double state over the Krylov basis. The associated Lanczos coefficients match those for chaotic motion on the SL(2,R)SL(2,\mathbb{R})SL(2,R) group. By including non-perturbative effects in the path integral, which computes coarse-grained ensemble averages, we find that the complexity saturates at late times. The saturation value is given by the exponential of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. Our results introduce a new way to compute the Hilbert space dimension of complex interacting systems from the saturating value of spread complexity.
A bstract In this work, we propose a quantum-mechanically measurable basis for the computation of spread complexity. Current literature focuses on computing different powers of the Hamiltonian to construct a basis for the Krylov state space and the computation of the spread complexity. We show, through a series of proofs, that time-evolved states with different evolution times can be used to construct an equivalent space to the Krylov state space used in the computation of the spread complexity. Afterwards, we introduce the effective dimension, which is upper-bounded by the number of pairwise distinct eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian. The computation of the spread complexity requires knowledge of the Hamiltonian and a classical computation of the different powers of the Hamiltonian. The computation of large powers of the Hamiltonian becomes increasingly difficult for large systems. The first part of our work addresses these issues by defining an equivalent space, where the original basis consists of quantum-mechanically measurable states. We demonstrate that a set of different time-evolved states can be used to construct a basis. We subsequently verify the results through numerical analysis, demonstrating that every time-evolved state can be reconstructed using the defined vector space. Based on this new space, we define an upper-bounded effective dimension and analyze its influence on finite-dimensional systems. We further show that the Krylov space dimension is equal to the number of pairwise distinct eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian, enabling a method to determine the number of eigenenergies the system has experimentally. Lastly, we compute the spread complexities of both basis representations and observe almost identical behavior, thus enabling the computation of spread complexities through measurements.
Commonly, the notion of "quantum chaos'' refers to the fast scrambling of information throughout complex quantum systems undergoing unitary evolution. Motivated by the Krylov complexity and the operator growth hypothesis, we demonstrate that the entropy of the population distribution for an operator in time is a useful way to capture the complexity of the internal information dynamics of a system when subject to an environment and is, in principle, agnostic to the specific choice of operator basis. We demonstrate its effectiveness for the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, examining the dynamics of the system in both its Krylov basis and the basis of operator strings. We prove that the former basis minimises spread complexity while the latter is an eigenbasis for high dissipation. In both cases, we probe the long-time dynamics of the model and the phenomenological effects of decoherence on the complexity of the dynamics.