Weak integrability breaking and level spacing distribution

TL;DR

This paper investigates how weak perturbations affect the transition from integrable to chaotic behavior in spin chains, revealing different volume scaling laws for the crossover depending on the strength of integrability breaking.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of level spacing statistics to distinguish weak from strong integrability breaking in spin chains, highlighting different volume scaling laws.

Findings

Weak breaking shows a 1/L^2 crossover scaling.

Strong breaking exhibits a 1/L^3 crossover scaling.

The transition to chaos depends on the perturbation strength and system size.

Abstract

Recently it was suggested that certain perturbations of integrable spin chains lead to a weak breaking of integrability in the sense that integrability is preserved at the first order in the coupling. Here we examine this claim using level spacing distribution. We find that the volume dependent crossover between integrable and chaotic level spacing statistics which marks the onset of quantum chaotic behaviour, is markedly different for weak vs. strong breaking of integrability. In particular, for the gapless case we find that the crossover coupling as a function of the volume $L$ scales with a $1/L^2$ law for weak breaking as opposed to the $1/L^3$ law previously found for the strong case.