The nonintegrable transverse-field Ising model is a common platform for studying ergodic quantum dynamics. In this work, we introduce a simple variant of the model in which this ergodic behaviour is suppressed by introducing a spatial inhomogeneity in the interaction strengths. For this we partition the chain into two equal segments within which the spins interact with different coupling strengths. The ratio of these couplings defines an inhomogeneity parameter, whose variation away from unity leads to constrained dynamics. We characterize this crossover using multiple diagnostics, such as the long-time saturation of out-of-time-ordered correlators, level-spacing statistics, and the spectral form factor. We further examine the consequences for operator growth in Krylov space and for entanglement generation in the system's eigenstates. Together, these results demonstrate that introducing a macroscopic inhomogeneity in coupling strengths provides a minimal, disorder-free route to breaking ergodicity in this specific model of interacting spins.
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The nonintegrable transverse-field Ising model is a common platform for studying ergodic quantum dynamics. In this work, we introduce a simple variant of the model in which this ergodic behaviour is suppressed by introducing a spatial inhomogeneity in the interaction strengths. For this we partition the chain into two equal segments within which the spins interact with different coupling strengths. The ratio of these couplings defines an inhomogeneity parameter, whose variation away from unity leads to constrained dynamics. We characterize this crossover using multiple diagnostics, such as the long-time saturation of out-of-time-ordered correlators, level-spacing statistics, and the spectral form factor. We further examine the consequences for operator growth in Krylov space and for entanglement generation in the system's eigenstates. Together, these results demonstrate that introducing a macroscopic inhomogeneity in coupling strengths provides a minimal, disorder-free route to breaking ergodicity in this specific model of interacting spins.
Time New Roman 10 We investigate signatures of quantum chaos within Ising spin chains subjected to transverse and longitudinal fields, incorporating both local (nearest-neighbor) and non-local (long-range) couplings. While local Ising models may exhibit integrable or chaotic dynamics contingent on interaction strengths and field parameters, systems with non-local interactions generally display a stronger propensity toward chaos, even when the non-local couplings are weak. By examining the distribution of energy level spacings through the level spacing ratio, we delineate the transition from integrable to chaotic regimes and characterize the emergence of quantum chaos in these systems. Our analysis demonstrates that non-local couplings facilitate faster operator spreading and more intricate dynamical behavior, enabling these systems to approach maximal chaos more readily than their local counterparts. Additionally, we analyze Krylov complexity as a dynamical probe of chaos, observing a characteristic peak followed by a plateau at late times in chaotic regimes. This behavior provides a quantitative means to distinguish between integrable and chaotic phases, with the growth rate and saturation level of the complexity serving as effective indicators. Our findings underscore the role of non-local interactions in accelerating the onset of chaos and modifying dynamical complexity in quantum spin chains.
Building upon recent research in spin systems with nonlocal interactions, this study investigates operator growth using the Krylov complexity in different nonlocal versions of the Ising model. We find that the nonlocality results in a faster scrambling of the operator to all sites. While the saturation value of Krylov complexity of local integrable and local chaotic theories differ by a significant margin, this difference is much suppressed when nonlocal terms are introduced in both regimes. This results from the faster scrambling of information in the presence of nonlocality. In addition, we investigate the behavior of level statistics and spectral form factor as probes of quantum chaos to study the integrability breaking due to nonlocal interactions. Our numerics indicate that in the nonlocal case, late time saturation of Krylov complexity distinguishes between different underlying theories, while the early time complexity growth distinguishes different degrees of nonlocality.
We investigate signatures of quantum chaos within Ising spin chains subjected to transverse and longitudinal fields, incorporating both local (nearest-neighbor) and non-local (long-range) couplings. While local Ising models may exhibit integrable or chaotic dynamics contingent on interaction strengths and field parameters, systems with non-local interactions generally display a stronger propensity toward chaos, even when the non-local couplings are weak. By examining the distribution of energy level spacings through the level spacing ratio, we delineate the transition from integrable to chaotic regimes and characterize the emergence of quantum chaos in these systems. Our analysis demonstrates that non-local couplings facilitate faster operator spreading and more intricate dynamical behavior, enabling these systems to approach maximal chaos more readily than their local counterparts. Additionally, we analyze Krylov complexity as a dynamical probe of chaos, observing a characteristic peak followed by a plateau at late times in chaotic regimes. This behavior provides a quantitative means to distinguish between integrable and chaotic phases, with the growth rate and saturation level of the complexity serving as effective indicators. Our findings underscore the role of non-local interactions in accelerating the onset of chaos and modifying dynamical complexity in quantum spin chains.
We investigate the interplay between confinement and Krylov complexity in the long-range transverse-field Ising chain, where power-law interactions ∼1/rα generate an effective confining potential between domain walls without an explicit symmetry-breaking field. Using the time-averaged Krylov state complexity after a quench as a diagnostic, we find that the complexity is strongly suppressed and only weakly system size-dependent at small α and small transverse field hx, where confinement is strongest, and crosses over to rapid growth at larger α, where it increases with system size. Within the confined regime, the oscillation frequencies of the complexity agree with the meson masses of an effective two-kink model, with the dominant frequency growing linearly with the lightest meson mass and the time-averaged complexity decreasing approximately as its inverse square. We further study operator Krylov complexity at finite temperature using the Wightman inner product. At low temperature, it exhibits bounded oscillations that directly encode the meson spectrum, whereas this structure is progressively washed out as the temperature increases. These results identify Krylov complexity as a spectroscopic probe of interaction-induced confinement and reproduce, in a microscopic lattice model, the hallmarks of Krylov complexity identified in confining field theories.
We investigate the anatomy and complexity of quantum states in Krylov space, in the ergodic and many-body localised (MBL) phases of a disordered, interacting spin chain. The Krylov basis generated by the Hamiltonian from an initial state provides a representation in which the spread of the time-evolving state constitutes a basis-optimised measure of complexity. We show that the long-time Krylov spread complexity sharply distinguishes the two phases. In the ergodic regime, the infinite-time complexity scales linearly with the Fock-space dimension, indicating that the state spreads over a finite fraction of the Krylov chain. By contrast, it grows sublinearly in the MBL regime, implying that the long-time state occupies only a vanishing fraction of the chain. Further, the profile of the infinite-time state along the Krylov chain exhibits a stretched-exponential decay in the MBL regime. This behaviour reflects a broad distribution of decay lengthscales, associated with different eigenstates contributing to the long-time state. Consistently, a large-deviation analysis of the statistics of eigenstate spread complexities shows that while the ergodic regime receives contributions from almost all eigenstates, the complexity in the MBL regime is dominated by a vanishing fraction of eigenstates, which have anomalously large complexity relative to the typical ones.
A bstract Quantum complexity, suitably defined, has been suggested as an important probe of late-time dynamics of black holes, particularly in the context of AdS/CFT. A notion of quantum complexity can be effectively captured by quantifying the spread of an operator in Krylov space as a consequence of time evolution. Complexity is expected to behave differently in chaotic many-body systems, as compared to integrable ones. In this paper we investigate Krylov complexity for the case of interacting integrable models at finite size and find that complexity saturation is suppressed as compared to chaotic systems. We associate this behavior with a novel localization phenomenon on the Krylov chain by mapping the theory of complexity growth and spread to an Anderson localization hopping model with off-diagonal disorder, and find that localization is enhanced in the integrable case due to a stronger disorder in the hopping amplitudes, inducing an effective suppression of Krylov complexity. We demonstrate this behavior for an interacting integrable model, the XXZ spin chain, and show that the same behavior results from a phenomenological model that we define: this model captures the essential features of our analysis and is able to reproduce the behaviors we observe for chaotic and integrable systems via an adjustable disorder parameter.