Quantum chaos in the Brownian SYK model with large finite N : OTOCs and tripartite information

Abstract

Abstract We consider the Brownian SYK model of N interacting Majorana fermions, with random couplings that are taken to vary independently at each time. We study the out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs) of arbitrary observables and the Rényi-2 tripartite information of the unitary evolution operator, which were proposed as diagnostic tools for quantum chaos and scrambling, respectively. We show that their averaged dynamics can be studied as a quench problem at imaginary times in a model of N qudits, where the Hamiltonian displays site-permutational symmetry. By exploiting a description in terms of bosonic collective modes, we show that for the quantities of interest the dynamics takes place in a subspace of the effective Hilbert space whose dimension grows either linearly or quadratically with N , allowing us to perform numerically exact calculations up to N = 106. We analyze in detail the interesting features of the OTOCs, including their dependence on the chosen observables, and of the tripartite information. We observe explicitly the emergence of a scrambling time t ∗ ∼ ln N controlling the onset of both chaotic and scrambling behavior, after which we characterize the exponential decay of the quantities of interest to the corresponding Haar scrambled values.