arXiv · 2607.18998
Free energy and spectral edge of the SYK model
Abstract
We introduce a microscopic framework that gives the first rigorous derivation of the Schwinger--Dyson thermodynamics of the Sachdev--Ye--Kitaev model. For fixed, even interaction order $q\geq 4$, we prove that the annealed and quenched normalized pressures converge to the Schwinger--Dyson pressure $p_{{\rm SD},q}(\beta)$, at any fixed inverse temperature $\beta>0$. The proof is derived from the finite-$N$ Gibbs state, and it contains three new ingredients: a single-site cavity expansion that keeps the bulk Gibbs state intact, a finite-dimensional locality estimate yielding label-uniform conditional factorization of the Euclidean cavity fields, and an exact Majorana-bath representation of the leading diagrams. We further determine the asymptotic location of the largest eigenvalue, which answers a question posed by Feng--Tian--Wei. Consequently, the sample free-energy density converges almost surely to the zero-temperature value along every sequence $\beta\equiv \beta_N\to\infty$.
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Yukun He. 2026-07-21. Free energy and spectral edge of the SYK model. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18998
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