Adiabatic Eigenstate Deformations as a Sensitive Probe for Quantum Chaos

In the past decades, it was recognized that quantum chaos, which is essential for the emergence of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, manifests itself in the effective description of the eigenstates of chaotic Hamiltonians through random matrix ensembles and the eigenstate thermalization hypo...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Mohit Pandey, Pieter W. Claeys, David K. Campbell, Anatoli Polkovnikov, Dries Sels
Formato: article
Lenguaje:EN
Publicado: American Physical Society 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://doaj.org/article/9ffdb471ddb9435c938eb8e358f9a7f2
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
Descripción
Sumario:In the past decades, it was recognized that quantum chaos, which is essential for the emergence of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, manifests itself in the effective description of the eigenstates of chaotic Hamiltonians through random matrix ensembles and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Standard measures of chaos in quantum many-body systems are level statistics and the spectral form factor. In this work, we show that the norm of the adiabatic gauge potential, the generator of adiabatic deformations between eigenstates, serves as a much more sensitive measure of quantum chaos. We are able to detect transitions from integrable to chaotic behavior at perturbation strengths orders of magnitude smaller than those required for standard measures. Using this alternative probe in two generic classes of spin chains, we show that the chaotic threshold decreases exponentially with system size and that one can immediately detect integrability-breaking (chaotic) perturbations by analyzing infinitesimal perturbations even at the integrable point. In some cases, small integrability breaking is shown to lead to anomalously slow relaxation of the system, exponentially long in system size.