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Spectral statistics in many-body quantum chaotic systems with symmetries

ORAL

Abstract


We study the spectral statistics of spatially-extended many-body quantum systems with on-site Abelian symmetries or local constraints, focusing primarily on those with conserved dipole and higher moments. In the limit of large local Hilbert space dimension, we find that the spectral form factor of Floquet random circuits can be mapped exactly to a classical Markov circuit, and, at late times, is related to the partition function of a frustration-free Rokhsar-Kivelson (RK) type Hamiltonian. Through this mapping, we show that the inverse of the spectral gap of the RK-Hamiltonian lower bounds the Thouless time of the underlying circuit. For systems with conserved higher moments, we derive a field theory for the corresponding RK-Hamiltonian by proposing a generalized height field representation for the Hilbert space of the effective spin chain. Using the field theory formulation, we obtain the dispersion of the low-lying excitations of the RK-Hamiltonian in the continuum limit, which allows us to extract the Thouless time. In particular, we analytically argue that in a system of length L that conserves the m-th multipole moment, the Thouless time scales subdiffusively as L^(2m+2).

Presenters

  • Amos Chan

    Princeton University

Authors

  • Sanjay Moudgalya

    Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology, Caltech

  • Abhinav Prem

    Princeton University

  • David A Huse

    Princeton University

  • Amos Chan

    Princeton University