Replica Symmetry Breaking for the Integrable Two-Site Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Model

TL;DR

This paper investigates a nonhermitian two-site Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, revealing phase transitions, spectral properties, and connections to QCD-like matrix models, with insights into its thermodynamic behavior and differences from four-body models.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes a novel two-site nonhermitian SYK model, deriving its free energy and spectral properties, and relating it to chiral phase transition models in QCD.

Findings

The model exhibits an infinite number of phase transitions.

The free energy matches that of a QCD chiral condensate matrix model.

Low-temperature behavior differs significantly from four-body SYK models.

Abstract

We analyze a two-body nonhermitian two-site Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with the couplings of one site complex conjugated to the other site. This model, with no explicit coupling between the sites, shows an infinite number of phase transitions which is a consequence of the partition function factorizing into a product over Matsubara frequencies. We calculate the quenched free energy in two different ways, first in terms of the single-particle energies, and second by solving the Schwinger-Dyson equations. The first calculation can be done entirely in terms of a one-site model. The conjugate replica enters due to non-analyticities when Matsubara frequencies enter the spectral support of the coupling matrix. The second calculation is based on the replica trick of the two-site partition function. Both methods give the same result. The free-fermion partition function can be rephrased as a matrix model for the coupling matrix. Up to minor details, this model is the random matrix model that describes the chiral phase transition of QCD, and the order parameter of the two-body model corresponds to the chiral condensate of QCD. Comparing to the corresponding four-body model, we are able to determine which features of the free energy are due to chaotic nature of the four-body model. The high-temperature phase of both models is entropy dominated, and in both cases is determined by the spectral density. The four-body SYK model has a low-temperature phase whose free energy is almost temperature-independent, signaling an effective gap of the theory even though the actual spectrum does not exhibit a gap. However the low-temperature free energy of the two-body SYK model is not flat, in fact it oscillates to arbitrarily low temperature. This indicates a less desirable feature that the entropy of the two-body model is not always positive, which most likely is a consequence of the nonhermiticity.