2024/03/19 by García-García, Antonio M., Verbaarschot, Jacobus J. M., Zheng, Jie-ping · 4 citations
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2403.12359
A distinct feature of Hermitian quantum chaotic dynamics is the exponential increase of certain out-of-time-order-correlation (OTOC) functions around the Ehrenfest time with a rate given by a Lyapunov exponent. Physically, the OTOCs describe the growth of quantum uncertainty that crucially depends on the nature of the quantum motion. Here, we employ the OTOC in order to provide a precise definition of dissipative quantum chaos. For this purpose, we compute analytically the Lyapunov exponent for the vectorized formulation of the large q-limit of a q-body Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model coupled to a Markovian bath. These analytic results are confirmed by an explicit numerical calculation of the Lyapunov exponent for several values of q ≥ 4 based on the solutions of the Schwinger-Dyson and Bethe-Salpeter equations. We show that the Lyapunov exponent decreases monotonically as the coupling to the bath increases and eventually becomes negative at a critical value of the coupling signaling a transition to a dynamics which is no longer quantum chaotic. Therefore, a positive Lyapunov exponent is a defining feature of dissipative many-body quantum chaos. The observation of the breaking of the exponential growth for sufficiently strong coupling suggests that dissipative quantum chaos may require in certain cases a sufficiently weak coupling to the environment.