paper

Operator complexity: a journey to the edge of Krylov space

arXiv:2009.01862 · doi:10.1007/JHEP06(2021)062

Abstract

Heisenberg time evolution under a chaotic many-body Hamiltonian transforms an initially simple operator into an increasingly complex one, as it spreads over Hilbert space. Krylov complexity, or `K-complexity', quantifies this growth with respect to a special basis, generated by by successive nested commutators with the operator. In this work we study the evolution of K-complexity in finite-entropy systems for time scales greater than the scrambling time . We prove rigorous bounds on K-complexity as well as the associated Lanczos sequence and, using refined parallelized algorithms, we undertake a detailed numerical study of these quantities in the SYK model, which is maximally chaotic, and compare the results with the SYK model, which is integrable. While the former saturates the bound, the latter stays exponentially below it. We discuss to what extent this is a generic feature distinguishing between chaotic vs. integrable systems.

v2: published version

References in corpus (7)

Cited by in corpus (122)