Quantum Chaos in Many-Body Systems Without a Classical Analogue

TL;DR

This paper investigates quantum chaos in many-body systems without classical analogues, focusing on the PXP spin chain model to explore ergodicity, spectral statistics, and eigenstate properties, revealing intermediate chaotic behavior and weak ergodicity breaking.

Contribution

It provides new insights into quantum chaos diagnostics in the PXP model, including eigenstate thermalization violations, non-Gaussian eigenvector statistics, and ballistic energy spreading.

Findings

Spectral statistics approach Wigner--Dyson with increasing system size

Existence of states violating eigenstate thermalization hypothesis

Observation of ballistic energy fronts during quench

Abstract

In classical systems, chaos is clearly defined via the behavior of trajectories. In quantum systems with a classical analogue one finds that the transition from regular to chaotic dynamics is signified by a change in the spectral statistics. This has been found to remain true for quantum systems with no classical analogue, including many-body systems. Furthermore, quantum chaotic systems explore all the allowed configurations in the Hilbert space, i.e. they are ergodic, while integrable systems, and systems in the many-body localized phase, are restricted to a certain subspace of the available phase space, and hence strongly break ergodicity. In this dissertation, we study the intermediate behavior between ergodicity and localization, i.e. the weak breaking of ergodicity. The model examined is the PXP spin chain model, where spins are allowed to flip only under certain kinetic constraints. We start by reproducing some already established results. First, we explore the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) for this model and demonstrate the existence of a small number of states, throughout the PXP spectrum, that violate the ETH. Then we study the level-spacing statistics of the model, a well-known quantum chaos diagnostic, which turns out to be close to semi-Poisson and approach Wigner--Dyson statistics for large system sizes. Moreover, we examine various aspects of the model that have not been studied before. For example, the eigenvector component statistics, another quantum chaos diagnostic, for the PXP model turn out to be non-Gaussian. Finally, we perform a quench, in order to study how the energy spreads throughout the system, and observe ballistic fronts.