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arXiv:2605.27512

Many-Body Quantum Chaos At All Time Scales

Antonio M. García-García, Lucas Sá, Jacobus J. M. Verbaarschot, Jie-Ping Zheng

hep-thcond-mat.stat-mechnlin.CDquant-phSubmitted May 26, 2026• Announced May 28, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We describe the dynamics of many-body quantum chaotic systems at all time scales by studying the Green's and out-of-time order correlation (OTOC) functions of the four-body, $N$-Majorana Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. By combining the scramblon formalism and random-matrix-theory techniques, we obtain analytical expressions for these functions at all times. The early exponential growth of the OTOC is followed by an exponential decay at a rate governed by that of the Green's function (the real part of the leading complex Ruelle-Pollicott resonances). For late times that scale exponentially with $N$, both functions have a dip-ramp-plateau pattern for $N \mathrm{mod}8 = 2, 6$ that deviates substantially from the ergodic prediction due to local-in-energy correlations of matrix elements and eigenvalues, even after the Heisenberg time.

Comments
10 pages, 5 figures

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We describe the dynamics of many-body quantum chaotic systems at all time scales by studying the Green's and out-of-time order correlation (OTOC) functions of the four-body, NNN-Majorana Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. By combining the scramblon formalism and random-matrix-theory techniques, we obtain analytical expressions for these functions at all times. The early exponential growth of the OTOC is followed by an exponential decay at a rate governed by that of the Green's function (the real part of the leading complex Ruelle-Pollicott resonances). For late times that scale exponentially with NNN, both functions have a dip-ramp-plateau pattern for Nmod8=2,6N \mathrm{mod}8 = 2, 6Nmod8=2,6 that deviates substantially from the ergodic prediction due to local-in-energy correlations of matrix elements and eigenvalues, even after the Heisenberg time.
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.
Abstract We study numerically and analytically the time dependence and saturation of out-of-time ordered correlators (OTOC) in chaotic few-body quantum-mechanical systems: quantum Henon-Heiles system (weakly chaotic), BMN matrix quantum mechanics (strongly chaotic) and Gaussian random matrix ensembles. The growth pattern of quantum-mechanical OTOC is complex and nonuniversal, with no clear exponential regime at relevant timescales in any of the examples studied (which is not in contradiction to the exponential growth found in the literature for many-body systems, i.e. fields). On the other hand, the plateau (saturated) value of OTOC reached at long times decreases with temperature in a simple and universal way: exp(const./T2) for strong chaos (including random matrices) and exp(const./T) for weak chaos. For small matrices and sufficiently complex operators, there is also another, high-temperature regime where the saturated OTOC grows with temperature. Therefore, the plateau OTOC value is a meaningful indicator of few-body quantum chaos. We also discuss some general consequences of our findings for the AdS/CFT duality.
We propose a characterization of quantum many-body chaos: given a collection of simple operators, the set of all possible pair correlations between these operators can be organized into a matrix with a random-matrix-like spectrum. This approach is particularly useful for locally interacting systems, which do not generically show exponential Lyapunov growth of out-of-time-ordered correlators. We demonstrate the validity of this characterization by numerically studying the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and a one-dimensional spin chain with random magnetic field (XXZ model).
A distinct feature of Hermitian quantum chaotic dynamics is the exponential increase of certain out-of-time-order correlation (OTOC) functions around the Ehrenfest time with a rate given by a Lyapunov exponent. Physically, the OTOCs describe the growth of quantum uncertainty that crucially depends on the nature of the quantum motion. Here, we employ the OTOC in order to provide a precise definition of dissipative quantum chaos. For this purpose, we compute analytically the Lyapunov exponent for the vectorized formulation of the large- q limit of a q -body Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model coupled to a Markovian bath. These analytic results are confirmed by an explicit numerical calculation of the Lyapunov exponent for several values of q ≥ 4 based on the solutions of the Schwinger-Dyson and Bethe-Salpeter equations. We show that the Lyapunov exponent decreases monotonically as the coupling to the bath increases and eventually becomes negative at a critical value of the coupling signaling a transition to a dynamics which is no longer quantum chaotic. Therefore, a positive Lyapunov exponent is a defining feature of dissipative many-body quantum chaos. The observation of the breaking of the exponential growth for sufficiently strong coupling suggests that dissipative quantum chaos may require in certain cases a sufficiently weak coupling to the environment. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) measure the scrambling of information and are a powerful diagnostic of chaos. In chaotic quantum systems with a classical analog, their relaxation towards equilibrium is dictated by the classical Ruelle--Pollicott resonances. We investigate higher-order OTOCs in quantum maps, prototypical one-body systems with a classical limit showing all the essential features of chaotic dynamics. We demonstrate numerically that in the intermediate-time regime they decay exponentially at a rate that depends only on the parity of the order: odd-order OTOCs decay at the same rate as classical correlations, given by the leading Ruelle--Pollicott resonance, and even-order ones at twice that rate. Both are far slower than the naive expectation, under which the rate would grow in proportion to the order. We then mimic the effect of an environment by defining a coarse-grained superoperator whose effect is to introduce decoherence into the system, and find that the expected proportionality between rate and order is thereby restored. Finally, we show that at long times each higher-order OTOC becomes dominated by a single free cumulant, whose saturation value falls off inversely with the dimension of the Hilbert space, signalling the emergence of asymptotic freeness and highlighting the relevance of free probability theory as a framework for the study of quantum chaos.
A bstract We investigate minimal two-body Hamiltonians with random interactions that generate spectra resembling those of Gaussian random matrices, a phenomenon we term quadratic quantum chaos . Unlike integrable two-body fermionic systems, the corresponding hard-core boson models exhibit genuinely chaotic dynamics, closely paralleling the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model in its spin representation. This chaotic behavior is diagnosed through spectral statistics and measures of operator growth, including Krylov complexity and the late-time decay of higher-order out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs); the latter reveals the emergence of freeness in the sense of free probability. Moreover, the fractal dimension and Stabilizer Rényi entropy of a representative mid-spectrum eigenstate show finite-size deviations yet converge toward Haar-randomness as the system size increases. This convergence, constrained by local interactions, highlights the “weakly chaotic” character of these eigenstates. Owing to their simplicity and bosonic nature, these minimal models may constitute promising and resource-efficient candidates for probing quantum chaos and information scrambling on near-term quantum devices.