@article {2808, title = {Rainbow Scars: From Area to Volume Law}, year = {2021}, month = {7/12/2021}, abstract = {

Quantum many-body scars (QMBS) constitute a new quantum dynamical regime in which rare \"scarred\" eigenstates mediate weak ergodicity breaking. One open question is to understand the most general setting in which these states arise. In this work, we develop a generic construction that embeds a new class of QMBS, rainbow scars, into the spectrum of an arbitrary Hamiltonian. Unlike other examples of QMBS, rainbow scars display extensive bipartite entanglement entropy while retaining a simple entanglement structure. Specifically, the entanglement scaling is volume-law for a random bipartition, while scaling for a fine-tuned bipartition is sub-extensive. When internal symmetries are present, the construction leads to multiple, and even towers of rainbow scars revealed through distinctive non-thermal dynamics. To this end, we provide an experimental road map for realizing rainbow scar states in a Rydberg-atom quantum simulator, leading to coherent oscillations distinct from the strictly sub-volume-law QMBS previously realized in the same system.\ 

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03416}, author = {Christopher M. Langlett and Zhi-Cheng Yang and Julia Wildeboer and Alexey V. Gorshkov and Thomas Iadecola and Shenglong Xu} } @article {2299, title = {Accessing scrambling using matrix product operators}, journal = {Nature Physics }, volume = {16}, year = {2020}, month = {2/2020}, pages = {199-204}, abstract = {

Scrambling, a process in which quantum information spreads over a complex quantum system becoming inaccessible to simple probes, happens in generic chaotic quantum many-body systems, ranging from spin chains, to metals, even to black holes. Scrambling can be measured using out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), which are closely tied to the growth of Heisenberg operators. In this work, we present a general method to calculate OTOCs of local operators in local one-dimensional systems based on approximating Heisenberg operators as matrix-product operators (MPOs). Contrary to the common belief that such tensor network methods work only at early times, we show that the entire early growth region of the OTOC can be captured using an MPO approximation with modest bond dimension. We analytically establish the goodness of the approximation by showing that if an appropriate OTOC is close to its initial value, then the associated Heisenberg operator has low entanglement across a given cut. We use the method to study scrambling in a chaotic spin chain with 201 sites. Based on this data and OTOC results for black holes, local random circuit models, and non-interacting systems, we conjecture a universal form for the dynamics of the OTOC near the wavefront. We show that this form collapses the chaotic spin chain data over more than fifteen orders of magnitude.

}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0712-4}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.00801}, author = {Shenglong Xu and Brian Swingle} } @article {2456, title = {The operator L{\'e}vy flight: light cones in chaotic long-range interacting systems}, journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett. }, volume = {124}, year = {2020}, month = {7/6/2020}, abstract = {

We propose a generic light cone phase diagram for chaotic long-range r\−α interacting systems, where a linear light cone appears for α\≥d+1/2 in d dimension. Utilizing the dephasing nature of quantum chaos, we argue that the universal behavior of the squared commutator is described by a stochastic model, for which the exact phase diagram is known. We provide an interpretation in terms of the L{\'e}vy flights and show that this suffices to capture the scaling of the squared commutator. We verify these phenomena in numerical computation of a long-range spin chain with up to 200 sites.\ 

}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.180601}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.08646}, author = {Tianci Zhou and Shenglong Xu and Xiao Chen and Andrew Guo and Brian Swingle} } @article {2672, title = {A Sparse Model of Quantum Holography}, year = {2020}, month = {8/5/2020}, abstract = {

We study a sparse version of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model defined on random hypergraphs constructed either by a random pruning procedure or by randomly sampling regular hypergraphs. The resulting model has a new parameter, k, defined as the ratio of the number of terms in the Hamiltonian to the number of degrees of freedom, with the sparse limit corresponding to the thermodynamic limit at fixed k. We argue that this sparse SYK model recovers the interesting global physics of ordinary SYK even when k is of order unity. In particular, at low temperature the model exhibits a gravitational sector which is maximally chaotic. Our argument proceeds by constructing a path integral for the sparse model which reproduces the conventional SYK path integral plus gapped fluctuations. The sparsity of the model permits larger scale numerical calculations than previously possible, the results of which are consistent with the path integral analysis. Additionally, we show that the sparsity of the model considerably reduces the cost of quantum simulation algorithms. This makes the sparse SYK model the most efficient currently known route to simulate a holographic model of quantum gravity. We also define and study a sparse supersymmetric SYK model, with similar conclusions to the non-supersymmetric case. Looking forward, we argue that the class of models considered here constitute an interesting and relatively unexplored sparse frontier in quantum many-body physics.

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02303}, author = {Shenglong Xu and Leonard Susskind and Yuan Su and Brian Swingle} } @article {2373, title = {Butterfly effect in interacting Aubry-Andre model: thermalization, slow scrambling, and many-body localization}, year = {2019}, month = {02/19/2019}, abstract = {

The many-body localization transition in quasiperiodic systems has been extensively studied in recent ultracold atom experiments. At intermediate quasiperiodic potential strength, a surprising Griffiths-like regime with slow dynamics appears in the absence of random disorder and mobility edges. In this work, we study the interacting Aubry-Andre model, a prototype quasiperiodic system, as a function of incommensurate potential strength using a novel dynamical measure, information scrambling, in a large system of 200 lattice sites. Between the thermal phase and the many-body localized phase, we find an intermediate dynamical phase where the butterfly velocity is zero and information spreads in space as a power-law in time. This is in contrast to the ballistic spreading in the thermal phase and logarithmic spreading in the localized phase. We further investigate the entanglement structure of the many-body eigenstates in the intermediate phase and find strong fluctuations in eigenstate entanglement entropy within a given energy window, which is inconsistent with the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Machine-learning on the entanglement spectrum also reaches the same conclusion. Our large-scale simulations suggest that the intermediate phase with vanishing butterfly velocity could be responsible for the slow dynamics seen in recent experiments.

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.07199}, author = {Shenglong Xu and Xiao Li and Yi-Ting Hsu and Brian Swingle and Sankar Das Sarma} } @article {2253, title = {Locality, Quantum Fluctuations, and Scrambling}, journal = {Phys. Rev. X }, volume = {9}, year = {2019}, month = {9/18/2019}, abstract = {

Thermalization of chaotic quantum many-body systems under unitary time evolution is related to the growth in complexity of initially simple Heisenberg operators. Operator growth is a manifestation of information scrambling and can be diagnosed by out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs). However, the behavior of OTOCs of local operators in generic chaotic local Hamiltonians remains poorly understood, with some semiclassical and large N models exhibiting exponential growth of OTOCs and a sharp chaos wavefront and other random circuit models showing a diffusively broadened wavefront. In this paper we propose a unified physical picture for scrambling in chaotic local Hamiltonians. We construct a random time-dependent Hamiltonian model featuring a large N limit where the OTOC obeys a Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov (FKPP) type equation and exhibits exponential growth and a sharp wavefront. We show that quantum fluctuations manifest as noise (distinct from the randomness of the couplings in the underlying Hamiltonian) in the FKPP equation and that the noise-averaged OTOC exhibits a cross-over to a diffusively broadened wavefront. At small N we demonstrate that operator growth dynamics, averaged over the random couplings, can be efficiently simulated for all time using matrix product state techniques. To show that time-dependent randomness is not essential to our conclusions, we push our previous matrix product operator methods to very large size and show that data for a time-independent Hamiltonian model are also consistent with a diffusively-broadened wavefront.

}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.9.031048}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.05376}, author = {Shenglong Xu and Brian Swingle} } @article {2425, title = {The Speed of Quantum Information Spreading in Chaotic Systems}, year = {2019}, month = {08/19/2019}, abstract = {

We present a general theory of quantum information propagation in chaotic quantum many-body systems. The generic expectation in such systems is that quantum information does not propagate in localized form; instead, it tends to spread out and scramble into a form that is inaccessible to local measurements. To characterize this spreading, we define an information speed via a quench-type experiment and derive a general formula for it as a function of the entanglement density of the initial state. As the entanglement density varies from zero to one, the information speed varies from the entanglement speed to the butterfly speed. We verify that the formula holds both for a quantum chaotic spin chain and in field theories with an AdS/CFT gravity dual. For the second case, we study in detail the dynamics of entanglement in two-sided Vaidya-AdS-Reissner-Nordstrom black branes. We also show that, with an appropriate decoding process, quantum information can be construed as moving at the information speed, and, in the case of AdS/CFT, we show that a locally detectable signal propagates at the information speed in a spatially local variant of the traversable wormhole setup.

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.06993}, author = {Josiah Couch and Stefan Eccles and Phuc Nguyen and Brian Swingle and Shenglong Xu} } @article {2203, title = {Scrambling dynamics across a thermalization-localization quantum phase transition}, year = {2018}, abstract = {

We study quantum information scrambling, specifically the growth of Heisenberg operators, in large disordered spin chains using matrix product operator dynamics to scan across the thermalization-localization quantum phase transition. We observe ballistic operator growth for weak disorder, and a sharp transition to a phase with sub-ballistic operator spreading. The critical disorder strength for the ballistic to sub-ballistic transition is well below the many body localization phase transition, as determined from finite size scaling of energy eigenstate entanglement entropy in small chains. In contrast, we find that the operator dynamics is not very sensitive to the actual eigenstate localization transition. These data are discussed in the context of a universal form for the growing operator shape and substantiated with a simple phenomenological model of rare regions.

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.06086}, author = {Subhayan Sahu and Shenglong Xu and Brian Swingle} }