English

The chiral SYK model

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-01-14 v4 Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

We study the generalization of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model to a 1+11+1 dimensional chiral SYK model of NN flavors of right-moving chiral Majorana fermions with all-to-all random 4-fermion interactions. The interactions in this model are exactly marginal, leading to an exact scaling symmetry. We show the Schwinger-Dyson equation of this model in the large NN limit is exactly solvable. In addition, we show this model is integrable for small N6N\le6 by bosonization. Surprisingly, the two point function in the large NN limit has exactly the same form as that for N=4N=4, although the four point functions of the two cases are quite different. The ground state entropy in the large NN limit is the same as that of NN free chiral Majorana fermions, leading to a zero ground state entropy density. The OTOC of the model in the large NN limit exhibits a non-trivial spacetime structure reminscent of that found by Gu and Kitaev for generic SYK-like models. Specifically we find a Lyapunov regime inside an asymmetric butterfly cone, which are signatures of quantum chaos, and that the maximal velocity dependent Lyapunov exponent approaches the chaos bound 2π/β2\pi/\beta as the interaction strength approaches its physical upper bound. Finally, the model is integrable for (at least) N6N\le6 but chaotic in the large NN limit, leading us to conjecture that there is a transition from integrability to chaos as NN increases past a critical value.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.03308,
  title  = {The chiral SYK model},
  author = {Biao Lian and S. L. Sondhi and Zhenbin Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.03308},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

51 pages, 13 figures, typos corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:47:27.673Z