Quantum chaos in supersymmetric Yang-Mills-like model: equation of state, entanglement, and spectral form-factors

TL;DR

This paper investigates a supersymmetric quantum-mechanical model resembling the BFSS matrix model, revealing a transition from low-energy eigenstates to chaotic spectra, with implications for quantum chaos, entanglement, and spectral form-factors.

Contribution

It demonstrates a sharp transition in spectral and entanglement properties in a supersymmetric model, linking low-energy states to chaotic behavior without affecting thermodynamics.

Findings

Spectral form-factor shows ramp behavior indicating quantum chaos.

Entanglement entropy remains constant at low energies and grows at the chaos transition.

High-energy eigenstates exhibit universal level-spacing fluctuations.

Abstract

We analyze in detail a sharp transition between the low-energy, low-dimensional eigenstates and the high-energy chaotic bulk of the spectrum for a simple supersymmetric quantum-mechanical model with Hamiltonian $\hat{H}_S = \left(\hat{p}_1^2 + \hat{p}_2^2 + \hat{x}_1^2 \, \hat{x}_2^2 \right) \otimes I + \hat{x}_1 \otimes \sigma_1 + \hat{x}_2 \otimes \sigma_3$, which mimics the structure of the Banks-Fischler-Susskind-Stanford (BFSS) matrix model, the spatially compactified $\mathcal{N} = 1$ super-Yang-Mills theory. We conjecture that this transition might be similar to the transition between the $D0$-brane and $M$-theory regimes in the BFSS model, and find that it does not lead to irregularities in the thermodynamic equation of state. We demonstrate that real-time spectral form-factor for our supersymmetric model exhibits the ``ramp'' behavior typical for quantum chaos. We also analyze the entanglement entropy and the spectrum of the reduced density matrix of the eigenstates of $\hat{H}_S$, considering one of the bosonic degrees of freedom as a subsystem. The entanglement entropy of low-energy eigenstates appears to be practically energy-independent. Exactly at the onset of random-matrix-type level spacing fluctuations, this behavior rapidly changes into a steady growth of entanglement with energy. We demonstrate that the spectrum of the reduced density matrix also exhibits universal level-spacing fluctuations towards its higher end, even for the ground state of the supersymmetric model. Thus even the regularly spaced, non-chaotic eigenstates contain some information about semi-classical chaotic dynamics at high energies.