Strongly coupled phonon fluid and Goldstone modes in an anharmonic quantum solid: transport and chaos

Abstract

We study properties of thermal transport and quantum many-body chaos in a lattice model with $N\to\infty$ oscillators per site, coupled by strong anharmonic terms. We first consider a model with only optical phonons. We find that the thermal diffusivity $D_{\rm th}$ and chaos diffusivity $D_L$ (defined as $D_L = v_B^2/ λ_L$, where $v_B$ and $λ_L$ are the butterfly velocity and the scrambling rate, respectively) satisfy $D_{\rm th} \approx γD_L$ with $γ\gtrsim 1$. At intermediate temperatures, the model exhibits a "quantum phonon fluid" regime, where both diffusivities satisfy $D^{-1} \propto T$, and the thermal relaxation time and inverse scrambling rate are of the order the of Planckian timescale $\hbar/k_B T$. We then introduce acoustic phonons to the model and study their effect on transport and chaos. The long-wavelength acoustic modes remain long-lived even when the system is strongly coupled, due to Goldstone's theorem. As a result, for $d=1,2$, we find that $D_{\rm th}/D_L\to \infty$, while for $d=3$, $D_{\rm th}$ and $D_{L}$ remain comparable.