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The delocalization or scrambling of quantum information has emerged as a central ingredient in the understanding of thermalization in isolated quantum many-body systems. Recently, significant progress has been made analytically by modeling non-integrable systems as periodically driven systems, lacking a Hamiltonian picture, while honest Hamiltonian dynamics are frequently limited to small system sizes due to computational constraints. In this paper, we address this by investigating the role of conservation laws (including energy conservation) in the thermalization process from an information-theoretic perspective. For general non-integrable models, we use the equilibrium approximation to show that the maximal amount of information is scrambled (as measured by the tripartite mutual information of the time-evolution operator) at late times even when a system conserves energy. In contrast, we explicate how when a system has additional symmetries that lead to degeneracies in the spectrum, the amount of information scrambled must decrease. This general theory is exemplified in case studies of holographic conformal field theories (CFTs) and the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. Due to the large Virasoro symmetry in 1+1D CFTs, we argue that, in a sense, these holographic theories are not maximally chaotic, which is explicitly seen by the non-saturation of the second Rényi tripartite mutual information. The roles of particle-hole and U(1) symmetries in the SYK model are milder due to the degeneracies being only two-fold, which we confirm explicitly at both large- and small-N. We reinterpret the operator entanglement in terms of the growth of local operators, connecting our results with the information scrambling described by out-of-time-ordered correlators, identifying the mechanism for suppressed scrambling from the Heisenberg perspective.
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Temporal fluctuations of correlators in integrable and chaotic quantum systems
We provide bounds on temporal fluctuations around the infinite-time average of out-of-time-ordered and time-ordered correlators of many-body quantum systems without energy gap degeneracies. For physical initial states, our bounds predict the exponential decay of the temporal fluctuations as a function of the system size. We numerically verify this prediction for chaotic and interacting integrable spin-1/2 chains, which satisfy the assumption of our bounds. On the other hand, we show analytically and numerically that for the XX model, which is a noninteracting system with gap degeneracies, the temporal fluctuations decay polynomially with system size for operators that are local in the fermion representation and decrease exponentially in the system size for non-local operators. Our results demonstrate that the decay of the long-time temporal fluctuations of correlators cannot be used as a reliable metric of chaos or lack thereof.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1936006
- PAR ID:
- 10488019
- Publisher / Repository:
- SciPost Foundation
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SciPost Physics
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 2542-4653
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.21468/SciPostPhys.15.6.244
