These notes are a short introduction to the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. We discuss: SYK and tensor models as a new class of large N quantum field theories, the near-conformal invariance in the infrared, the computation of correlation functions, generalizations of SYK, and applications to AdS/CFT and strange metals.
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model attracts attention in the context of information scrambling, which represents delocalization of quantum information and is quantified by the out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC). The SYK model contains $N$ fermions with disordered and four-body interactions. Here, we introduce a variant of the SYK model, which we refer to as the Wishart SYK model. We investigate the Wishart SYK model for complex fermions and that for hard-core bosons. We show that the ground state of the Wishart SYK model is massively degenerate and the residual entropy is extensive, and tha…
We study the effect of non-Gaussian average over the random couplings in a complex version of the celebrated Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. Using a Polchinski-like equation and random tensor Gaussian universality, we show that the effect of this non-Gaussian averaging leads to a modification of the variance of the Gaussian distribution of couplings at leading order in N. We then derive the form of the effective action to all orders. An explicit computation of the modification of the variance in the case of a quartic perturbation is performed for both the complex SYK model mentioned above and t…
We show that a non-Hermitian two coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model can provide thermodynamic structure equivalent to Hermitian two coupled SYK model. The energy spectrum, the entanglement degree of the ground states and the low energy effective action of this model are not influenced by the non-Hermiticity. The novel biorthogonal ground states demonstrates that two SYK sites, one of which can be in the ground state and the other in the Schwarzian excited state by tuning the non-Hermiticity. We find evidence that the free energy is independent of the non-Hermiticity.
We consider the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model where interaction involves $q$ fermions at a time. We find the next order correction to the thermal two-point function in the large $q$ expansion. Using this result we find the next order correction to the SYK free energy.
We study $\mathcal{N}=2$ supersymmetric Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models with complex fermions at non-zero background charge. Motivated by multi-charge supersymmetric black holes, we propose a new $\mathcal{N}=2$ SYK model with multiple $U(1)$ symmetries, integer charges, and a non-vanishing supersymmetric index, realizing features not present in known SYK models. In both models, a conformal solution with a super-Schwarzian mode emerges at low temperatures, signalling the appearance of nearly AdS$_2$/BPS physics. However, in contrast to complex SYK, the fermion scaling dimension depends on the b…
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is an all-to-all interacting Majorana fermion model for many-body quantum chaos and the holographic correspondence. Here we construct fermionic all-to-all Floquet quantum circuits of random four-body gates designed to capture key features of SYK dynamics. Our circuits can be built using local ingredients in Majorana devices, namely charging-mediated interactions and braiding Majorana zero modes. This offers an analog-digital route to SYK quantum simulations that reconciles all-to-all interactions with the topological protection of Majorana zero modes, a key fe…
We continue the investigation of coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev(SYK) models without Schwarzian action dominance. Like the original SYK, at large N and low energies these models have an approximate reparametrization symmetry. However, the dominant action for reparametrizations is non-local due to the presence of irrelevant local operator with small conformal dimension. We semi-analytically study different thermodynamic properties and the 4-point function and demonstrate that they significantly differ from the Schwarzian prediction. However, the residual entropy and maximal chaos exponent are the sam…
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model describes interacting fermionic zero modes in zero spatial dimensions, e.g. quantum dot, with interactions strong enough to completely washout quasiparticle excitations in the infrared. In this paper, we consider the complex-valued SYK model at initial temperature $T$ and chemical potential $μ$ coupled to a large reservoir by a quench at time $t=0$. The reservoir is kept at zero temperature and charge neutrality. We find that the dynamics of the discharging process of the SYK quantum dot reveals a distinctive characteristic of the SYK non-Fermi liquid (nFl) st…
We study the Lindbladian dynamics of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, where the SYK model is coupled to Markovian reservoirs with jump operators that are either linear or quadratic in the Majorana fermion operators. Here, the linear jump operators are non-random while the quadratic jump operators are sampled from a Gaussian distribution. In the limit of large $N$, where $N$ is the number of Majorana fermion operators, and also in the limit of large $N$ and $M$, where $M$ is the number of jump operators, the SYK Lindbladians are analytically tractable, and we obtain their stationary Green's f…
Given a class of $q$-local Hamiltonians, is it possible to find a simple variational state whose energy is a finite fraction of the ground state energy in the thermodynamic limit? Whereas product states often provide an affirmative answer in the case of bosonic (or qubit) models, we show that Gaussian states fail dramatically in the fermionic case, like for the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models. This prompts us to propose a new class of wavefunctions for SYK models inspired by the variational coupled cluster algorithm. We introduce a static ("0+0D") large-$N$ field theory to study the energy, two…
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a quantum mechanical model of fermions interacting with $q$-body random couplings. For $q=2$, it describes free particles, and is non-chaotic in the many-body sense, while for $q>2$ it is strongly interacting and exhibits many-body chaos. In this work we study the entanglement entropy (EE) of the SYK$q$ models, for a bipartition of $N$ real or complex fermions into subsystems containing $2m$ real/$m$ complex fermions and $N-2m$/$N-m$ fermions in the remainder. For the free model SYK$2$, we obtain an analytic expression for the EE, derived from the $β$-Jacob…
We study the entanglement entropy of eigenstates (including the ground state) of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. We argue for a volume law, whose coefficient can be calculated analytically from the density of states. The coefficient depends on not only the energy density of the eigenstate but also the subsystem size. Very recent numerical results of Liu, Chen, and Balents confirm our analytical results.
Entanglement is one of the most important concepts in quantum physics. We review recent progress in understanding the quantum entanglement in many-body systems using large-$N$ solvable models: the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model and its generalizations. We present the study of entanglement entropy in the original SYK Model using three different approaches: the exact diagonalization, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, and the path-integral representation. For coupled SYK models, the entanglement entropy shows linear growth and saturation at the thermal value. The saturation is related to r…
Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) is a concrete solvable model with non-Fermi liquid behavior and maximal chaos. In this work, we study the entanglement Rényi entropy for the subsystems of the SYK model in the Kourkoulou-Maldacena states. We use the path-integral approach and take the saddle point approximation in the large-$N$ limit. We find a first-order transition exist when tuning the subsystem size for the $q=4$ case, while it is absent for the $q=2$ case. We further study the entanglement dynamics for such states under the real-time evolution for noninteracting, weakly interacting and strongly int…
We argue that in certain class of coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev(SYK) models the low energy physics at large N is governed by a non-local action rather than the Schwartzian action. We present a partial analytic and extensive numerical evidence for this. We find that these models are maximally chaotic and have the same residual entropy as Majorana SYK. However, thermodynamic quantities, such as heat capacity and diffusion constant are different.
The search for a quantum theory of gravity has led to the discovery of quantum many-body systems that are dual to gravitational models with quantum properties. The perhaps most famous of these systems is the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. It features maximal scrambling of quantum information, and opens a potential inroad to experimentally investigating aspects of quantum gravity. A scalable laboratory realisation of this model, however, remains outstanding. Here, we propose a feasible implementation of the SYK model in cavity quantum electrodynamics platforms. Through detailed analytical and n…
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model incorporates rich physics, ranging from exotic non-Fermi liquid states without quasiparticle excitations, to holographic duality and quantum chaos. However, its experimental realization remains a daunting challenge due to various unnatural ingredients of the SYK Hamiltonian such as its strong randomness and fully nonlocal fermion interaction. At present, constructing such a nonlocal Hamiltonian and exploring its dynamics is best through digital quantum simulation, where state-of-the-art techniques can already handle a moderate number of qubits. Here we demonst…
In arXiv:1707.02197, the authors considered the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with quadratic perturbation (also known as mass-deformed SYK), and claimed that the quantum Lyapunov exponent would vanish in the regime of low temperature and small quartic coupling. We calculate the exponent exactly in that regime and show that it is nonzero.
We study the SYK$_4$ model with a weak SYK$_2$ term of magnitude $Γ$ beyond the simplest perturbative limit considered previously. For intermediate values of the perturbation strength, $J/N \ll Γ\ll J/\sqrt{N}$, fluctuations of the Schwarzian mode are suppressed, and the SYK$_4$ mean-field solution remains valid beyond the timescale $t_0 \sim N/J$ up to $t_* \sim J/Γ^2$. Out-of-time-order correlation function displays at short time intervals exponential growth with maximal Lyapunov exponent $2πT$, but its prefactor scales as $T$ at low temperatures $T \leq Γ$.
Nucleation of Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Clusters in One Spatial Dimension
A. Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory(阿·阿里哈尼扬国家科学实验室);Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme(马克斯·普朗克复杂系统物理研究所);Department of Physics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst(马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校物理系)
We study a description of the large N limit of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model in terms of quantum mechanics without quenched disorder. Instead of random couplings, we introduce massive scalar fields coupled to fermions, and study a small mass limit of the theory. We show that, under a certain condition, the correlation functions of fermions reproduce those of the SYK model with a temperature dependent coupling constant in the large N limit. We also discuss a supersymmetric generalization of our quantum mechanical model. As a byproduct, we develop an efficient way of estimating the large N b…
We show that the low temperature phase of a conjugate pair of uncoupled, quantum chaotic, nonhermitian systems such as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model or the Ginibre ensemble of random matrices are dominated by replica symmetry breaking configurations with a nearly flat free energy that terminates in a first order phase transition. In the case of the SYK model, we show explicitly that the spectrum of the effective replica theory has a gap. These features are strikingly similar to those induced by wormholes in the gravity path integral which suggests a close relation between both configuratio…
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a model of $q$ interacting fermions whose large N limit is dominated by melonic graphs. In this review we first present a diagrammatic proof of that result by direct, combinatorial analysis of its Feynman graphs. Gross and Rosenhaus have then proposed a generalization of the SYK model which involves fermions with different flavors. In terms of Feynman graphs, these flavors can be seen as reminiscent of the colors used in random tensor theory. Applying modern tools from random tensors to such a colored SYK model, all leading and next-to-leading orders diagra…
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model describes electrons with random and all-to-all interactions, and realizes a many-body state without quasiparticle excitations, and a non-vanishing extensive entropy $S_0$ in the zero temperature limit. Its low energy theory coincides the low energy theory of the near-extremal charged black holes with Bekenstein-Hawking entropy $S_0$. Several mesoscopic experimental configurations realizing SYK quantum dynamics over a significant intermediate temperature scale have been proposed. We investigate quantum thermoelectric transport in such configurations, and descri…
We study a bipartite version of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. We show that the model remains solvable in the limit of large-$N$ in the same sense as the original model if the ratio of both flavors is kept finite. The scaling dimensions of the two species can be tuned continuously as a function of the ratio. We also investigate the finite-size spectral properties of the model. We show how the level statistics differs from the original SYK model and infer an additional exchange symmetry in the bipartite model.
We prove non-perturbative bounds on the time evolution of the probability distribution of operator size in the $q$-local Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with $N$ fermions, for any even integer $q>2$ and any positive even integer $N>2q$. If the couplings in the Hamiltonian are independent and identically distributed Rademacher random variables, the infinite temperature many-body Lyapunov exponent is almost surely finite as $N\rightarrow\infty$. In the limit $q \rightarrow \infty$, $N\rightarrow \infty$, $q^{6+δ}/N \rightarrow 0$, the shape of the size distribution of a growing fermion, obtained by lead…
Supersymmetry is a powerful concept in quantum many-body physics. It helps to illuminate ground state properties of complex quantum systems and gives relations between correlation functions. In this work, we show that the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, in its simplest form of Majorana fermions with random four-body interactions, is supersymmetric. In contrast to existing explicitly supersymmetric extensions of the model, the supersymmetry we find requires no relations between couplings. The type of supersymmetry and the structure of the supercharges are entirely set by the number of interacting Majo…
We provide an algorithm for preparing the thermofield double (TFD) state of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model without the need for an auxiliary bath. Following previous work, the TFD can be cast as the approximate ground state of a Hamiltonian, $H_{\text{TFD}}$. Using variational quantum circuits, we propose and implement a gradient-based algorithm for learning parameters that find this ground state, an application of the variational quantum eigensolver. Concretely, we find quantum circuits that prepare the ground state of $H_{\text{TFD}}$ for the $q=4$ SYK model up to $N=12$.
We study a sparse Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with $N$ Majoranas where only $\sim k N$ independent matrix elements are non-zero. We identify a minimum $k \gtrsim 1$ for quantum chaos to occur by a level statistics analysis. The spectral density in this region, and for a larger $k$, is still given by the Schwarzian prediction of the dense SYK model, though with renormalized parameters. Similar results are obtained for a beyond linear scaling with $N$ of the number of non-zero matrix elements. This is a strong indication that this is the minimum connectivity for the sparse SYK model to still h…
In this work, we study a generalization of the coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with $U(1)$ charge conservations. The model contains two copies of the complex SYK model at different chemical potentials, coupled by a direct hopping term. In the zero-temperature and small coupling limit with small averaged chemical potential, the ground state is an eternal wormhole connecting two sides, with a specific charge $Q=0$, which is equivalent to a thermofield double state. We derive the conformal Green's functions and determine corresponding IR parameters. At higher chemical potential, the system …
We show that one can quantum simulate the dynamics of a Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model with $N$ Majorana modes for time $t$ to precision $ε$ with gate complexity $O(N^{7/2} t + N^{5/2} t \,{\rm polylog}(N/ ε))$. In addition to scaling sublinearly in the number of Hamiltonian terms, this gate complexity represents an exponential improvement in $1/ε$ and large polynomial improvement in $N$ and $t$ over prior state-of-the-art algorithms which scale as $O(N^{10} t^2 / ε)$. Our approach involves a variant of the qubitization technique in which we encode the Hamiltonian $H$ as an asymmetric projection of a…
Motivated by recent works on atom-cavity realizations of fast scramblers, and on Cooper pairing in non-Fermi liquids, we study a family of solvable variants of the ($q=4$) Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model in which the rank and eigenvalue distribution of the coupling matrix $J_{ij,kl}$ are tuneable. When the rank is proportional to the number of fermions, the low temperature behavior is sensitive to the eigenvalue distribution. We obtain a complete classification of the possible non-Fermi liquid quantum phases. These include two previously studied phases whose fermion scaling dimension depends continuou…
We give an exposition of the SYK model with several new results. A non-local correction to the Schwarzian effective action is found. The same action is obtained by integrating out the bulk degrees of freedom in a certain variant of dilaton gravity. We also discuss general properties of out-of-time-order correlators.
We present a review of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model of compressible quantum many-body systems without quasiparticle excitations, and its connections to various theoretical studies of non-Fermi liquids in condensed matter physics. The review is placed in the context of numerous experimental observations on correlated electron materials. Strong correlations in metals are often associated with their proximity to a Mott transition to an insulator created by the local Coulomb repulsion between the electrons. We explore the phase diagrams of a number of models of such local electronic correlati…
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model spectral form factor exhibits absence of information loss in the form of a ramp and a plateau, that are typical of random matrix theory. In a large $N$ collective fields description, the ramp was reproduced by Saad, Shenker and Stanford \cite{Saad:2018bqo}, by replica symmetry breaking saddles for a connected component of the analytically continued to real times thermal partition function two point function. We derive a two sides Schwarzians effective action for fluctuations around the ramp critical saddles, by adapting to the two replica system a method by Kitaev a…
A crucial result on the celebrated Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model is that its large $N$ limit is dominated by melonic graphs. In this letter we offer a rigorous, diagrammatic proof of that result by direct, combinatorial analysis of its Feynman graphs.
The existence of a quantum butterfly effect in the form of exponential sensitivity to small perturbations has been under debate for a long time. Lately, this question gained increased interest due to the proposal to probe chaotic dynamics and scrambling using out-of-time-order correlators. In this work we study echo dynamics in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model under effective time reversal in a semiclassical approach. We demonstrate that small imperfections introduced in the time-reversal procedure result in an exponential divergence from the perfect echo, which allows to identify a Lyapunov expone…