Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 18, 2025

An Analog Macroscopic Technique for Studying Molecular Hydrodynamic Processes in Dense Gases and Liquids
Published on: December 4, 2017
Many-Body Chaos in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Model
Bryce Kobrin1,2, Zhenbin Yang3,4, Gregory D Kahanamoku-Meyer1
1Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Abstract:
Many-body chaos has emerged as a powerful framework for understanding thermalization in strongly interacting quantum systems. While recent analytic advances have sharpened our intuition for many-body chaos in certain large N theories, it has proven challenging to develop precise numerical tools capable of exploring this phenomenon in generic Hamiltonians. To this end, we utilize massively parallel, matrix-free Krylov subspace methods to calculate dynamical correlators in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model for up to N=60 Majorana fermions. We begin by showing that numerical results for two-point correlation functions agree at high temperatures with dynamical mean field solutions, while at low temperatures finite-size corrections are quantitatively reproduced by the exactly solvable dynamics of near extremal black holes. Motivated by these results, we develop a novel finite-size rescaling procedure for analyzing the growth of out-of-time-order correlators. Our procedure accurately determines the Lyapunov exponent, λ, across a wide range in temperatures, including in the regime where λ approaches the universal bound, λ=2π/β.
Related Concept Videos
Entropy
Entropy
When an ideal gas expands isothermally, the disorder in the gas increases. From the molecular perspective, the gas molecules have more volume to move around in.
Consider an infinitesimal step in the expansion, which...
First Law: Particles in One-dimensional Equilibrium
First Law: Particles in Two-dimensional Equilibrium
Newton's first law tells us about...
The Quantum-Mechanical Model of an Atom
Reduced Mass Coordinates: Isolated Two-body Problem

