We study impurity-induced particle growth and scrambling in clean one-dimensional free-fermion systems. We show that a single local impurity can act as a branching source: particle or operator weight propagates coherently into the free bulk, returns to the impurity, and is locally converted into additional degrees of freedom. We develop this branching picture in three complementary settings: a monitored free-fermion model with feedback, a fully unitary interacting particle model, and Heisenberg operator dynamics with an interacting impurity. In the monitored model, we find a feedback-driven transition for both boundary and bulk impurities. In the unitary particle and operator models, a boundary impurity gives rise to an analogous transition from saturation to sustained growth and scrambling. These results reveal how a single impurity can generate complex many-body dynamics in an otherwise clean and free quantum system.
We study impurity-induced particle growth and scrambling in clean one-dimensional free-fermion systems. We show that a single local impurity can act as a branching source: particle or operator weight propagates coherently into the free bulk, returns to the impurity, and is locally converted into additional degrees of freedom. We develop this branching picture in three complementary settings: a monitored free-fermion model with feedback, a fully unitary interacting particle model, and Heisenberg operator dynamics with an interacting impurity. In the monitored model, we find a feedback-driven transition for both boundary and bulk impurities. In the unitary particle and operator models, a boundary impurity gives rise to an analogous transition from saturation to sustained growth and scrambling. These results reveal how a single impurity can generate complex many-body dynamics in an otherwise clean and free quantum system.
In quantum many-body systems, interactions play a crucial role in the emergence of information scrambling. When particles interact throughout the system, the entanglement between them can lead to a rapid and chaotic spreading of quantum information, typically probed by the growth in operator size in the Heisenberg picture. In this study, we explore whether the operator undergoes scrambling when particles interact solely through a single impurity in generic spatial dimensions, focusing on fermion systems with spatial and temporal random hoppings. By connecting the dynamics of the operator to the symmetric exclusion process with a source term, we demonstrate the presence of an escape-to-scrambling transition when tuning the interaction strength for fermions in three dimensions. As a comparison, systems in lower dimensions are proven to scramble at arbitrarily weak interactions unless the hopping becomes sufficiently long-ranged. Our predictions are validated using both a Brownian circuit with a single Majorana fermion per site and a solvable Brownian SYK model with a large local Hilbert space dimension. This suggests the universality of the theoretical picture for free fermion systems with spatial and temporal randomness.
It is well established that the presence of single impurity can have a substantial impact on the transport properties of quantum many-body systems at low temperature. In this work, we investigate a close analog of this problem from the perspective of quantum information dynamics. We construct Brownian circuits and Clifford circuits consisting of a free fermion hopping term and a sole interaction. In both circuits, our findings reveal the emergence of operator scrambling. Notably, the growth of the operator can be mapped to the symmetric exclusion process in the presence of a source term localized at a single point. We demonstrate that in the one-dimensional system, both the operator and entanglement exhibit diffusive scaling. Conversely, in scenarios characterized by all-to-all hopping, the operator's size undergoes exponential growth, while the entanglement exhibits a linear increase over time.
Scrambling in many-body quantum systems causes initially local observables to spread uniformly over the whole available Hilbert space under unitary dynamics, which in lattice systems causes exponential suppression of dynamical correlation functions with system size. Here, we present a perturbed free quantum circuit model, in which ergodicity is induced by an impurity interaction placed on the system's boundary, that allows for demonstrating the underlying mechanism. This is achieved by mapping dynamical correlation functions of local operators acting at the boundary to a partition function with complex weights defined on a two-dimensional lattice with a helical topology. We evaluate this partition function in terms of transfer matrices, which allow for numerically treating system sizes far beyond what is accessible by exact diagonalization and whose spectral properties determine the asymptotic scaling of correlations. Combining analytical arguments with numerical results, we show that for impurities which remain unitary under partial transpose correlations are exponentially suppressed with system size in a particular scaling limit. In contrast, for generic impurities or generic locations of the local operators, correlations show persistent revivals with a period given by the system size.
In closed generic many-body systems, unitary evolution disperses local quantum information into highly nonlocal objects, resulting in thermalization. Such a process is called information scrambling, whose swiftness is quantified by the operator size growth. However, the impact of couplings to the environment on the process of information scrambling remains unexplored for quantum systems embedded within an environment. Here we predict a dynamical transition in quantum systems with all-to-all interactions accompanied by an environment, which separates two phases. In the dissipative phase, information scrambling halts as the operator size decays with time, while in the scrambling phase, dispersion of information persists, and the operator size grows and saturates to an O(N) value in the long-time limit with N the number of degrees of freedom of the systems. The transition is driven by the competition between the system's intrinsic and environment propelled scramblings and the environment-induced dissipation. Our prediction is derived from a general argument based on epidemiological models and demonstrated analytically via solvable Brownian Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models. We provide further evidence which suggests that the transition is generic to quantum chaotic systems when coupled to an environment. Our study sheds light on the fundamental behavior of quantum systems in the presence of an environment.
Many-body systems that saturate the quantum bound on chaos are attracting interest across a wide range of fields. Notable examples include the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and its variations, all characterized by some form or randomness and all-to-all couplings. Here, we study many-body quantum chaos in a quantum impurity model showing non-Fermi-liquid physics, the overscreened multichannel S U ( N ) Kondo model. We exactly compute the low-temperature behavior of the out-of-time order correlator in the limit of large N and large number of channels, K , at a fixed ratio γ = K / N . Because of strong correlations at the impurity site, the spin fractionalizes in auxiliary fermions and bosons. We show that all the degrees of freedom of our theory acquire a Lyapunov exponent that is linear in temperature as T → 0 , with a prefactor that depends on γ . Remarkably, for N = K , the impurity spin displays maximal chaos, while bosons and fermions only reach half of the maximal Lyapunov exponent. Our results highlight two key features: a nondisordered model that is maximally chaotic due to strong correlations at its boundary, with the maximal chaos appearing in a composite gauge-invariant operator, the impurity spin, and not in the auxiliary single-particle degrees of freedom.
Abstract In generic closed quantum systems, the complexity of operators increases under time evolution governed by the Heisenberg equation, reflecting the scrambling of local quantum information. However, when systems interact with an external environment, the system-environment coupling allows operators to escape from the system, inducing a dynamical transition between the scrambling phase and the dissipative phase. This transition is known as the environment-induced information scrambling transition, originally proposed in Majorana fermion systems. In this work, we advance this discovery by investigating the transition in charge-conserved systems with space-time randomness. We construct solvable Brownian Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models of complex fermions coupled to an environment, enabling the analytical computation of operator growth. We determine the critical dissipation strength, which is proportional to n(1−n) n ( 1 - n ) with n being the density of the complex fermions, arising from the suppression in the quantum Lyapunova exponent due to the Pauli blockade in the scattering process. We further analyze the density dependence of maximally scrambled operators at late time. Our results shed light on the intriguing interplay between information scrambling, dissipation, and conservation laws.