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arXiv · 2104.05721

Emergence of many-body quantum chaos via spontaneous breaking of unitarity

Yunxiang Liao·Victor Galitski
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Abstract

It is suggested that many-body quantum chaos appears as the spontaneous symmetry breaking of unitarity in interacting quantum many-body systems. It has been shown that many-body level statistics, probed by the spectral form factor (SFF) defined as $K(η,t)=\langle|{\rm Tr}\, \exp(-ηH + itH)|^2\rangle$, is dominated by a diffuson-type mode in a field theory analysis. The key finding of this Letter is that the "unitary" $η=0$ case is different from the $η\to 0^{\pm}$ limit, with the latter leading to a finite mass of these modes due to interactions. This mass suppresses a rapid exponential ramp in the SFF, which is responsible for the fast emergence of Poisson statistics in the non-interacting case, and gives rise to a non-trivial random matrix structure of many-body levels. The interaction-induced mass in the SFF shares similarities with the dephasing rate in the theory of weak localization and the Lyapunov exponent of the out-of-time-ordered correlators.

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Yunxiang Liao, Victor Galitski. 2022-04-20. Emergence of many-body quantum chaos via spontaneous breaking of unitarity. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevb.105.l140202

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