Phase diagram of a two-site coupled complex Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model

TL;DR

This paper explores the phase diagram of a two-site coupled complex SYK model, revealing multiple phase transitions and a rich structure influenced by chemical potential and coupling, with implications for understanding wormholes and dual field theories.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of the complex SYK model's phase diagram, identifying new phases and transitions, and derives an effective low energy action with extended symmetries.

Findings

Identification of multiple first order phase transitions.

Discovery of a charged wormhole phase.

Effective low energy action with $SL(2,R)\times U(1)$ symmetry.

Abstract

We study the thermodynamic properties of a two-site coupled complex Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model in the large $N$ limit by solving the saddle-point Schwinger-Dyson (SD) equations. We find that its phase diagram is richer than in the Majorana case. In the grand canonical ensemble, we identify a region of small chemical potential, and weak coupling between the two SYKs, for which two first order thermodynamic phase transitions occur as a function of temperature. First, we observe a transition from a cold wormhole phase to an intermediate phase that may correspond to a charged wormhole. For a higher temperature, there is another first order transition to the black hole phase. As in the Majorana case, the low temperature wormhole phase is gapped and, for sufficiently large coupling between the two complex SYK, or chemical potential, the first order transitions become crossovers. The total charge is good indicator to study the phase diagram of the model: it is zero in the cold wormhole phase and jumps discontinuously at the temperatures at which the transitions take place. Based on the approximate conformal symmetry of the ground state, expected to be close to a thermofield double state, we identify the effective low energy action of the model. It is a generalized Schwarzian action with $SL(2,R)\times U(1)$ symmetry with an additional potential and a extra degree of freedom related to the charge. In the large $N$ limit, results from this low energy action are consistent with those from the solution of the SD equations. Our findings are a preliminary step towards the characterization of traversable wormholes by its field theory dual, a strongly interacting fermionic system with charger, that is easier to model experimentally.