Recently, the steady states of non-unitary free fermion dynamics are found to exhibit novel critical phases with power-law squared correlations and a logarithmic subsystem entanglement. In this work, we theoretically understand the underlying physics by constructing solvable static/Brownian quadratic Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev chains with non-Hermitian dynamics. We find the action of the replicated system generally shows (one or infinite copies of) ${O(2)\times O(2)}$ symmetries, which is broken to ${O(2)}$ by the saddle-point solution. This leads to an emergent conformal field theory of the Goldstone modes. We derive the effective action and obtain the universal critical behaviors of squared correlators. Furthermore, the entanglement entropy of a subsystem ${A}$ with length ${L_A}$ corresponds to the energy of the half-vortex pair ${S\sim ρ_s \log L_A}$, where ${ρ_s}$ is the total stiffness of the Goldstone modes. We also discuss special limits with more than one branch of Goldstone modes and comment on interaction effects.
The pairing of two electrons on a Fermi surface due to an infinitesimal attraction between them always results in a superconducting instability at zero temperature ($T=0$). The equivalent question of pairing instability on a Luttinger surface (LS) -- a contour of zeros of the propagator -- instead leads to a quantum critical point (QCP) that separates a non-Fermi liquid (NFL) and superconductor. A surprising and little understood aspect of pair fluctuations at this QCP is that their thermodynamics maps to that of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model in the strong coupling limit. Here, we offer a …
We study the large $N$ saddle points of two SYK chains coupled by an interaction that is nonlocal in Euclidean time. We start from analytic treatment of the free case with $q=2$ and perform the numerical study of the interacting case $q=4$. We show that in both cases there is a nontrivial phase structure with infinite number of phases. Every phase correspond to a saddle point in the non-interacting two-replica SYK. The nontrivial saddle points have non-zero value of the replica-nondiagonal correlator in the sense of quasi-averaging, when the coupling between replicas is turned off. Thus, the n…
We study the SYK model in the large $N$ limit beyond the replica-diagonal approximation. First we show that there are exact replica-nondiagonal solutions of the saddle point equations for $q=2$ for any finite replica number $M$. In the interacting $q=4$ case we are able to construct the numerical solutions, which are in one-to-one correspondence to the analytic solutions of the quadratic model. These solutions are singular in the $M \to 0$ limit in both quadratic and quartic interaction cases. The calculations of the on-shell action at finite integer $M$ show that the nondiagonal replica-symme…
We find a late times approximation for the SYK spectral form factor from a large $N$ steepest descent version of the path integral over two replica collective fields. Main ingredients are a suitable uv regularization of the two replica kinetic operator, the property of its Fourier transform and some spectral analysis of the four point function two replica ladder kernel.
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…
We construct Brownian Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) chains subjected to continuous monitoring and explore possible entanglement phase transitions therein. We analytically derive the effective action in the large-$N$ limit and show that an entanglement transition is caused by the symmetry breaking in the enlarged replica space. In the noninteracting case with SYK$_2$ chains, the model features a continuous $O(2)$ symmetry between two replicas and a transition corresponding to spontaneous breaking of that symmetry upon varying the measurement rate. In the symmetry broken phase at low measurement rate,…
In this work, we introduce a symmetry-based approach to study the scrambling and operator dynamics of Brownian SYK models at large finite $N$ and in the infinite $N$ limit. We compute the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) in the Majorana model without charge conservation and the complex model with charge conservation, and demonstrate that in both models taking the random average of the couplings gives rise to emergent symmetry structures. The random averaging exactly maps the operator dynamics of the Majorana model and the complex model to the imaginary time dynamics of an SU(2) spin and a…
The nonlinear supermatrix $σ$-model is widely used to understand the physics of Anderson localization and the level statistics in noninteracting disordered electron systems. In contrast to the general belief that the supersymmetry method applies only to systems of noninteracting particles, we adopt this approach to the disorder averaging in the interacting models. In particular, we apply supersymmetry to study the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, where the disorder averaging has so far been performed only within the replica approach. We use a slightly modified, time-reversal invariant version of…
We investigate the electronic properties of the boson mode in a three-point fermion loop. In this framwork, the single-particle excitation and the many-body local (in imaginary time and momentum space) field effects are investigated in IR or UV limits with the density fluctuation induced by external potential (or bosonic frequency). While in the limit of vanishing effect of external potential, which is equivalent to UV limit of the fermionic frequency, the conserving approximation can be applied together with the Luttinger-Ward analysis, in which case the anomalous contribution to the fermion …
We study the time evolution of Rényi entropy in a system of two coupled Brownian SYK clusters evolving from an initial product state. The Rényi entropy of one cluster grows linearly and then saturates to the coarse grained entropy. This Page curve is obtained by two different methods, a path integral saddle point analysis and an operator dynamics analysis. Using the Brownian character of the dynamics, we derive a master equation which controls the operator dynamics and gives the Page curve for purity. Insight into the physics of this complicated master equation is provided by a complementary p…
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 discuss higher dimensional generalizations of the 0+1-dimensional Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model that has recently become the focus of intensive interdisciplinary studies by, both, the condensed matter and field-theoretical communities. Unlike the previous constructions where multiple SYK copies would be coupled to each other and/or hybridized with itinerant fermions via spatially short-ranged random hopping processes, we study algebraically varying long-range (spatially and/or temporally) correlated random couplings in the general d+1 dimensions. Such pertinent topics as translationally-inv…
In this paper, we study the entanglement entropy between two SYK systems with bilinear coupling. We use the replica trick to calculate the entanglement entropy in the ground state. In parallel, we calculate the entanglement entropy through the Ryu-Takayanagi formula in gravity. For the ground state that is dual to an eternal traversable wormhole in AdS_2, the bulk quantum correction to the entanglement entropy is of the same order as the minimal surface area. The ground state of the coupled system is close to a thermofield double state with particular temperature and they have the same entangl…
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…
We study the entanglement transition in monitored Brownian SYK chains in the large-$N$ limit. Without measurement the steady state $n$-th Rényi entropy is obtained by summing over a class of solutions, and is found to saturate to the Page value in the $n\rightarrow 1$ limit. In the presence of measurements, the analytical continuation $n\rightarrow 1$ is performed using the cyclic symmetric solution. The result shows that as the monitoring rate increases, a continuous von Neumann entanglement entropy transition from volume-law to area-law occurs at the point of replica symmetry unbreaking.
We present a replica path integral approach describing the quantum chaotic dynamics of the SYK model at large time scales. The theory leads to the identification of non-ergodic collective modes which relax and eventually give way to an ergodic long time regime (describable by random matrix theory). These modes, which play a role conceptually similar to the diffusion modes of dirty metals, carry quantum numbers which we identify as the generators of the Clifford algebra: each of the $2^N$ different products that can be formed from $N$ Majorana operators defines one effective mode. The competiti…
We present a systematic procedure to extract the dynamics of the low energy soft mode in SYK type models with a single energy scale $J$ and emergent reparametrization symmetry in the IR. This is given in the framework of the perturbation theory scheme of arXiv:1608.07567 based on specific (off-shell) breaking of conformal invariance in the UV, adjusted to yield the exact large-$N$ saddle point. While this breaking formally vanishes on-shell, it has a non-trivial effect on correlation functions and the effective action. In particular, it leads to the Schwarzian action with a specific coupling t…
Superconductivity is abundant near quantum-critical points, where fluctuations suppress the formation of Fermi liquid quasiparticles and the BCS theory no longer applies. Two very distinct approaches have been developed to address this issue: quantum-critical Eliashberg theory and holographic superconductivity. The former includes a strongly retarded pairing interaction of ill-defined fermions, the latter is rooted in the duality of quantum field theory and gravity theory. We demonstrate that both are different perspectives of the same theory. We derive holographic superconductivity in form of…
In this paper, we introduce an $\mathcal{N}=1$ supersymmetric SYK model with $SO(q)$ global symmetry. We study the large $N$ expansion of the bi-local collective action of our model. At strong coupling limit, this model exhibits a super-reparametrization symmetry, and the $SO(q)$ global symmetry is enhanced to a $\widehat{SO}(q)$ local symmetry. The corresponding symmetry algebra is the semi-direct product of the super-Virasoro and the super-Kac-Moody algebras. These emergent symmetries are spontaneously and explicitly broken, which leads to a low energy effective action: super-Schwarzian acti…
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…
We map the dynamics of entanglement in random unitary circuits, with finite on-site Hilbert space dimension $q$, to an effective classical statistical mechanics, and develop general diagrammatic tools for calculations in random unitary circuits. We demonstrate explicitly the emergence of a `minimal membrane' governing entanglement growth, which in 1+1D is a directed random walk in spacetime (or a variant thereof). Using the replica trick to handle the logarithm in the definition of the $n$th Rényi entropy $S_n$, we map the calculation of the entanglement after a quench to a problem of interact…
The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model provides an uncommon example of a chaotic theory that can be analysed analytically. In the deep infrared limit, the original model has an emergent conformal (reparametrisation) symmetry that is broken both spontaneously and explicitly. The explicit breaking of this symmetry comes about due to pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone modes that are not exact zero-modes of the model. In this paper, we study a version of the model which preserves the reparametrisation symmetry at all length scales. We study the heavy-light correlation functions of the operators in the conformal sp…
