The SYK model has played an important role in recent developments in many-body quantum chaos. We study a spatially local generalisation of it: the SYK lattice. Starting from the nonlinear action of pseudo-Goldstone bosons that dominate its dynamics at low temperatures, in the long wavelength limit we reorganise this action as the effective field theory for fluctuating hydrodynamics, thereby showing how the hydrodynamic degrees of freedom embed into the microscopic description of the model. We compute the hydrodynamic effective action to high orders in the derivative expansion and determine all the corresponding transport coefficients. Hence this work derives hydrodynamics from the microscopic description of a strongly coupled quantum many-body system.
The SYK model has played an important role in recent developments in many-body quantum chaos. We study a spatially local generalisation of it: the SYK lattice. Starting from the nonlinear action of pseudo-Goldstone bosons that dominate its dynamics at low temperatures, in the long wavelength limit we reorganise this action as the effective field theory for fluctuating hydrodynamics, thereby showing how the hydrodynamic degrees of freedom embed into the microscopic description of the model. We compute the hydrodynamic effective action to high orders in the derivative expansion and determine all the corresponding transport coefficients. Hence this work derives hydrodynamics from the microscopic description of a strongly coupled quantum many-body system.
Hydrodynamics as an effective field theory (EFT) has been immensely successful for predicting the behaviour of time-ordered correlation functions in the long-time, large-distance regime. In this paper, we analyse the predictions of hydrodynamics for scrambling as probed by out-of-time order correlators (OTOCs). To do so, we consider an all-derivative order generalisation of the Schwinger-Keldysh EFT of hydrodynamics extended to a four-fold time contour required to capture OTOCs. A crucial ingredient of the construction is a local SL(2,R) symmetry, which has previously been suggested as a mechanism for scrambling. We also derive this exact EFT from the microscopic formulation of the maximally chaotic low-temperature limit of the SYK lattice, thereby determining all transport coefficients for this model. As a novel application, we compute the OTOC of energy currents, find that its exponential growth saturates the chaos bound, and match it to expectations based on a shockwave (or scramblon) effective description. Our work shows that the universality of hydrodynamics degrees of freedom extends beyond traditional time-ordered correlators to more complex observables such as OTOCs.
There has been renewed interest in understanding the details and origins of chaos in quantum systems with many degrees of freedom. Chaos plays a significant role in holographic theories, hydrodynamic transport, and even the strange metal phase of condensed matter systems. With this importance, discovering a unified origin that yields universal results for chaotic systems is clearly desirable. In this thesis, we investigate the conjectured hydrodynamic origin of quantum many-body chaos, first posited in [1], by testing it with the next-to-leading order SYK model. We provide a review of how hydrodynamic theories are constructed, and how hydrodynamic theories with a certain symmetry possess all the standard features of chaos. We then review the leading order SYK model, demonstrate its chaotic behaviour, and compare it with the predictions of the hydrodynamic theory. We finally perform an in-depth investigation of the next-to-leading order SYK model, demonstrating that, while one sector of the theory satisfies the conjecture, another sector does not admit a hydrodynamic description. This shows that the conjecture must be modified to account for near-maximally chaotic theories.
We study properties of thermal transport and quantum many-body chaos in a lattice model with N→∞ oscillators per site, coupled by strong nonlinear terms. We first consider a model with only optical phonons. We find that the thermal diffusivity Dth and chaos diffusivity DL (defined as DL=vB2/λL, where vB and λL are the butterfly velocity and the scrambling rate, respectively) satisfy Dth≈γDL with γ≳1. At intermediate temperatures, the model exhibits a ``quantum phonon fluid'' regime, where both diffusivities satisfy D−1∝T, and the thermal relaxation time and inverse scrambling rate are of the order the of Planckian timescale ℏ/kBT. We then introduce acoustic phonons to the model and study their effect on transport and chaos. The long-wavelength acoustic modes remain long-lived even when the system is strongly coupled, due to Goldstone's theorem. As a result, for d=1,2, we find that Dth/DL→∞, while for d=3, Dth and DL remain comparable.
We study the dynamics of a locally conserved energy in ergodic, local many-body quantum systems on a lattice with no additional symmetry. The resulting dynamics is well approximated by a coarse grained, classical linear functional diffusion equation for the probability of all spatial configurations of energy. This is equivalent to nonlinear stochastic hydrodynamics, describing the diffusion of energy in physical spacetime. We find the absence of nonhydrodynamic slow degrees of freedom, a nonlinear fluctuation-dissipation theorem, and the emergence of a (weakly interacting) kinetic theory for hydrodynamic modes near thermal equilibrium. The observable part of the microscopic entropy obeys the local second law of thermodynamics, and quantitatively agrees with the phenomenological predictions of hydrodynamics. Our approach naturally generalizes to ergodic systems with additional symmetries, may lead to numerical algorithms to calculate diffusion constants for lattice models, and implies sufficiency conditions for a rigorous derivation of hydrodynamics in quantum systems.
Abstract Hydrodynamics is a powerful emergent theory for the large-scale behaviours in many-body systems, quantum or classical. It is a gradient series expansion, where different orders of spatial derivatives provide an effective description on different length scales. We report the first fully general derivation of third-order, or ‘dispersive’, terms in the hydrodynamic expansion. Our derivation is based on general principles of statistical mechanics, along with the assumption that the complete set of local and quasi-local conserved densities constitutes a good set of emergent degrees of freedom. We obtain fully general Kubo-like expressions for the associated hydrodynamic coefficients (also known as Burnett coefficients), and we determine their exact form in quantum integrable models, introducing in this way purely quantum higher-order terms into generalised hydrodynamics. We emphasise the importance of hydrodynamic gauge fixing at diffusive order, where we claim that it is parity-time-reversal, and not time-reversal, invariance that is at the source of Einstein’s relation, Onsager’s reciprocal relations, the Kubo formula and entropy production. At higher hydrodynamic orders we introduce a more general, nth order ‘symmetric’ gauge, which we show implies the validity of the higher-order hydrodynamic description.
A bstract The physics of the SYK model at low temperatures is dominated by a soft mode governed by the Schwarzian action. In [1] the linearised action was derived from the soft mode contribution to the four-point function, and physical arguments were presented for its nonlinear completion to the Schwarzian. In this paper, we give two derivations of the full nonlinear effective action in the large p limit, where p is the number of fermions in the interaction terms of the Hamiltonian. The first derivation uses that the collective field action of the large- p SYK model is Liouville theory with a non-conformal boundary condition that we study in conformal perturbation theory. This derivation can be viewed as an explicit version of the renormalisation group argument for the nonlinear soft mode action in [2]. The second derivation uses an Ansatz for how the soft mode embeds into the microscopic configuration space of the collective fields. We generalise our results for the large- p SYK chain and obtain a “Schwarzian chain” effective action for it. These derivations showcase that the large- p SYK model is a rare system, in which there is sufficient control over the microscopic dynamics, so that an effective description can be derived for it without the need for extra assumptions or matching (in the effective field theory sense).