Quantum Chaos in Perturbative Gauge Theory

by Tristan McLoughlin (Trinity College Dublin)

Friday 25 Feb 2022, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Rome

1/1-1 - Aula "A. Rostagni" (Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia - Edificio Marzolo)

Quantum many-body chaos is a ubiquitous phenomenon that occurs in many physical systems and is likely essential to understanding thermalisation.  We provide numerical evidence that the perturbative spectrum of anomalous dimensions in N=4 super-Yang-Mills is chaotic at finite number of colours. We calculate the probability distribution of level spacings and show that it is given by the Wigner-Dyson distribution of the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble random matrix theory.  For the Leigh-Strassler deformed theory with generic parameters, we show that the one-loop planar dilatation operator in the SU(3) sector is chaotic, with a spectrum that is well described by GUE Random Matrix Theory. For the imaginary-beta deformation, this provides a weak-coupling analogue of the chaotic dynamics seen for classical strings in the dual background.