On deforming and breaking integrability

TL;DR

This paper classifies various deformations of integrable models, especially in spin chains, and investigates how these deformations influence integrability and chaos, revealing different chaos onset behaviors.

Contribution

It identifies four types of deformations of integrable models, including subtle cases like long-range and perturbatively integrable deformations, and analyzes their effects on chaos in the XXZ spin chain.

Findings

Chaos onset varies with deformation type

Perturbatively integrable models show volume-scaling chaos onset

Long-range deformations can preserve integrability at all orders

Abstract

In this paper we study nearest-neighbour deformations of integrable models. After expanding in the deformation parameter, we identify four possible types of deformations. First there are deformations that simply break or preserve integrability. Then we find two different subtle cases. The first case is where the deformation is only integrable if all orders of the deformation parameter are taken into account. An example of these are the long-range deformations that appear in holographic models. The second case is when the deformation is perturbatively integrable to some order in the deformation parameter but can not be extended to an integrable model. In this paper we work this out for the XXZ spin chain and discuss the level statistics of each of these cases. We find numerical evidence that the onset of chaos occurs differently in each of these models. For the perturbatively integrable models, we find that the deformation strength at which chaos appears demonstrates a volume-scaling intermediate between strong and weak integrability breaking models.