Quantum chaos transition in a two-site SYK model dual to an eternal traversable wormhole

Abstract

It has been recently proposed by Maldacena and Qi that an eternal traversable wormhole in a two dimensional Anti de Sitter space (${\rm AdS}_2$) is the gravity dual of the low temperature limit of two Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models coupled by a relevant interaction (which we will refer to as spin operator). In this paper, we study spectral and eigenstate properties of this coupled SYK model. We have found that level statistics in the tail of the spectrum, and for a sufficiently weak coupling, shows substantial deviations from random matrix theory which suggests that traversable wormholes are not quantum chaotic. By contrast, for sufficiently strong coupling, corresponding to the black hole phase, level statistics are well described by random matrix theory. This transition in level statistics coincides approximately with a previously reported Hawking-Page transition for weak coupling. We have shown explicitly that this thermodynamic transition turns into a sharp crossover as the coupling increases. Likewise, this critical coupling also corresponds with the one at which the overlap between the ground state and the thermofield double state (TFD) is smallest. In the range of sizes we can reach by exact diagonalization, the ground state is well approximated by the TFD state only in the strong coupling limit. This is due to the fact that the ground state is close to the eigenstate of the spin operator corresponding to the lowest eigenvalue which is an exact TFD state at infinite temperature. In this region, the spectral density is separated into blobs centered around the eigenvalues of the spin operator. For weaker couplings, the exponential decay of coefficients in a tensor product basis, typical of the TFD, becomes power law. Finally, we have also found that the total Hamiltonian has an additional discrete symmetry which has not been reported previously.