Chaos controlled and disorder driven phase transitions induced by breaking permutation symmetry

TL;DR

This paper investigates how breaking permutation symmetry with disorder induces a continuous phase transition in quantum many-body systems, transitioning from area law to volume law entanglement, influenced by the system's underlying chaos.

Contribution

It reveals a novel phase transition driven by disorder breaking permutation symmetry, controlled by the degree of chaos in the system's original state.

Findings

Transition from area law to volume law entanglement at critical disorder strength.

Critical disorder strength approaches zero in fully chaotic systems.

Scaling of collective spin reveals properties of deep Hilbert space.

Abstract

The effects of disorder and chaos on quantum many-body systems can be superficially similar, yet their interplay has not been sufficiently explored. This work finds a continuous phase transition when disorder breaks permutation symmetry, with details of the transition being controlled by the degree of chaos in the clean limit. The system changes from an area law entangled phase in the permutation symmetric subspace where collective variables exist to volume law entanglement in the full Hilbert space, beyond a critical strength of the disorder. The critical strength tends to zero when the original disorder free system is fully chaotic. We study this mainly via the scaling of the collective spin of non-equilibrium states which transit to have properties of what has been dubbed "deep Hilbert space". This has potential implications for general many body physics, as well as technologies such as transmon qubits.