We show that the integrable state of charged SYK model does not thermalize even though the state has non-zero Lyapunov exponent. The chaotic state always thermalizes which is expected. So whether the system thermalizes or not depends on the initial state. We also show that the introduction of random mass deformation (q=2 SYK term) slows down thermalization but the system thermalizes exponentially fast. This is observed despite the fact that large (q=2) SYK interaction forces spectral statistics to obey Poisson statistics. This means that a precise measure of chaos and its prediction of thermalization is still lacking. In the chaotic state, the effective temperature is non-monotonic. It has a bump at relatively long time before settling down to the final value. With non-zero chemical potential, the effective temperature oscillates noticeably before settling down to the final value. The spectral asymmetry frequency does not change during quantum quenches.
We show that the integrable state of charged SYK model does not thermalize even though the state has non-zero Lyapunov exponent. The chaotic state always thermalizes which is expected. So whether the system thermalizes or not depends on the initial state. We also show that the introduction of random mass deformation (q=2 SYK term) slows down thermalization but the system thermalizes exponentially fast. This is observed despite the fact that large (q=2) SYK interaction forces spectral statistics to obey Poisson statistics. This means that a precise measure of chaos and its prediction of thermalization is still lacking. In the chaotic state, the effective temperature is non-monotonic. It has a bump at relatively long time before settling down to the final value. With non-zero chemical potential, the effective temperature oscillates noticeably before settling down to the final value. The spectral asymmetry frequency does not change during quantum quenches.
Abstract We study thermalization of charged SYK model in two different phases. We show that both the highly chaotic liquid phase and the dilute gas phase thermalize. Surprisingly the dilute gas state thermalizes instantaneously. We argue that this phenomenon arises because the system in this phase consists of only long-lived quasi-particles at very low density. The liquid state thermalizes exponentially fast. We also show that the additional introduction of random mass deformation (q = 2 SYK term) slows down thermalization but the system thermalizes exponentially fast. This is observed despite the fact that the addition of large q = 2 SYK interaction forces spectral statistics to obey Poisson statistics. An interesting new observation is that the effective temperature is non-monotonic during thermalization in the liquid state. It has a bump at relatively long time before settling down to the final value. With non-zero chemical potential, the effective temperature oscillates noticeably before settling down to the final value.
Abstract We study chaotic-integrable transition and the nature of quantum chaos in SYK model with chemical potential. We use a novel numerical technique to calculate the partition function explicitly. We show the phase transition in the presence of large chemical potential. We also show that a mass-like term consisting of two fermion random interaction (q = 2 SYK term) does not give rise to a sharp transition. We find that turning on the chemical potential suppresses the Lyapunov exponent in the chaotic phase exponentially.
The complex Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, featuring fermions with all-to-all interactions, serves as a dual paradigm for understanding non-Fermi liquid behavior and the holographic nature of charged black holes. Two defining characteristics of the standard SYK model are its maximal chaos (Lyapunov exponent λL=2πT at temperature T), and its finite zero-temperature residual entropy. While previous studies have largely focused on couplings drawn from a zero-mean Gaussian distribution, we investigate a generalized model with a finite mean-to-standard-deviation ratio, g≡J0/δJ of the coupling distribution in order to get deeper insight into the evolution of chaos. We find that increasing g yields the following effects: (i) The system remains a fast scrambler with λL=AT, but with a suppressed coefficient A<2π. (ii) In the limit g→∞, out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) no longer exhibit exponential growth with λL≃0. (iii) The spectral correlations indicative of late-time chaos maintain Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics for all values of g. (iv) The system preserves a finite residual entropy, albeit with reduced magnitude, for all g values. We conclude that in this generalized SYK model, there is a chaotic to non-chaotic crossover. Moreover different measures of chaos decouple, demonstrating that the presence of finite residual entropy does not strictly imply maximal chaos.
Abstract We investigate the thermalization of Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) models coupled via random interactions following quenches from the perspective of entanglement. Previous studies have shown that when a system of two SYK models coupled by random two-body terms is quenched from the thermofield double state with sufficiently low effective temperature, the Rényi entropies do not saturate to the expected thermal values in the large- N limit. Using numerical large- N methods, we first show that the Rényi entropies in a pair SYK models coupled by two-body terms can thermalize, if quenched from a state with sufficiently high effective temperature, and hence exhibit state-dependent thermalization. In contrast, SYK models coupled by single-body terms appear to always thermalize. We provide evidence that the subthermal behavior in the former system is likely a large- N artifact by repeating the quench for finite N and finding that the saturation value of the Rényi entropy extrapolates to the expected thermal value in the N → ∞ limit. Finally, as a finer grained measure of thermalization, we compute the late-time spectral form factor of the reduced density matrix after the quench. While a single SYK dot exhibits perfect agreement with random matrix theory, both the quadratically and quartically coupled SYK models exhibit slight deviations.
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model describes Majorana fermions with random interaction, which displays many interesting properties such as non-Fermi liquid behavior, quantum chaos, emergent conformal symmetry and holographic duality. Here we consider a SYK model or a chain of SYK models with N Majorana fermion modes coupled to another SYK model with N 2 Majorana fermion modes, in which the latter has many more degrees of freedom and plays the role as a thermal bath. For a single SYK model coupled to the thermal bath, we show that although the Lyapunov exponent is still proportional to temperature, it monotonically decreases from 2π/β (β = 1/(k B T), T is temperature) to zero as the coupling strength to the thermal bath increases. For a chain of SYK models, when they are uniformly coupled to the thermal bath, we show that the butterfly velocity displays a crossover from a T -dependence at relatively high temperature to a linear T-dependence at low temperature, with the crossover temperature also controlled by the coupling strength to the thermal bath. If only the end of the SYK chain is coupled to the thermal bath, the model can introduce a spatial dependence of both the Lyapunov exponent and the butterfly velocity. Our models provide canonical examples for the study of thermalization within chaotic models.
What does "instant thermalization" in large-q SYK models mean?
Motivated by the Planckian thermalization rate Γ∼T observed in the two-body interacting SYK model, we study thermalization in the q/2-body case. Previous studies of such systems have established the notion of instantaneous thermalization to leading order in 1/q. It was conjectured that the thermalization may still be Planckian but with a divergent rate Γ∼Tq, explaining the ``instantaneous'' part. For an analytically and numerically tractable system, we calculate the effective temperatures after a quench at time t=0 and indeed find a Planckian rate, albeit with the unexpected decaying behavior $Γ\sim T q^{-1} $. This is contrasted with the behavior of the causal Green's function G(t1,t2), which instantly acquires a thermal form in the two-time plane block t1,t2>0.
The resulting picture is that instant thermalization is a meaningful concept only for this block, while the off-diagonal blocks t1⋅t2<0 are inherently non-thermal at any q. Since the effective temperature is obtained from correlations spanning all blocks, it inherits a finite rate set by the off-diagonal. We illustrate this directly by studying the non-thermal correlations' time dependence.