From Dyson models to many-body quantum chaos

Abstract

A deep understanding of the mechanisms underlying many-body quantum chaos is one of the big challenges in contemporary theoretical physics. We tackle this problem in the context of a set of perturbed quadratic Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) Hamiltonians defined on graphs. This allows us to disentangle the geometrical properties of the underlying single-particle problem and the importance of the interaction terms, showing that the former is the dominant feature ensuring the single-particle to many-body chaotic transition. Our results are verified numerically with state-of-the-art numerical techniques, capable of extracting eigenvalues in a desired energy window of very large Hamiltonians. Our approach essentially provides a new way of viewing many-body chaos from a single-particle perspective.