Sparsity independent Lyapunov exponent in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model

Abstract

The saturation of a recently proposed universal bound on the Lyapunov exponent has been conjectured to signal the existence of a gravity dual. This saturation occurs in the low temperature limit of the dense Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, $N$ Majorana fermions with $q$-body ($q>2$) infinite-range interactions. We calculate certain Out of Time Order Correlators (OTOC) for $N\le 64$ fermions for a highly sparse SYK model and find no significant dependence of the Lyapunov exponent on sparsity up to near the percolation limit where the Hamiltonian breaks up into blocks. This suggests that in the sparse case, the Lyapunov exponent also saturates the low-temperature bound. A key ingredient to reaching $N = 64$ is the development of a novel quantum spin model simulation library that implements highly-optimized matrix-free Krylov subspace methods on Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). This leads to a significantly lower simulation time as well as vastly reduced memory usage over previous approaches, while using modest computational resources. Strong sparsity-driven statistical fluctuations require both the use of a vastly larger number of disorder realizations with respect to the dense limit and a careful finite size scaling analysis. Our results potentially broadens the landscape of theories that may have a gravity analogue.