Eigenstate Thermalization Scaling in Majorana Clusters: from Chaotic to Integrable Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Models

Abstract

The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is a conjecture on the nature of isolated quantum systems that guarantees the thermal behavior of subsystems when it is satisfied. ETH has been tested in various forms on a number of local many-body interacting systems. Here we examine the validity of ETH in a class of nonlocal disordered many-body interacting systems --- the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Majorana (SYK) models --- that may be tuned from chaotic behavior to integrability. Our analysis shows that SYK$_4$ (with quartic couplings), which is maximally chaotic in the large system size limit, satisfies the standard ETH scaling while SYK$_2$ (with quadratic couplings), which is integrable, does not. We show that the low-energy and high-energy properties are affected drastically differently when the two Hamiltonians are mixed.