Emergence of many-body quantum chaos via spontaneous breaking of unitarity

Abstract

It is suggested that many-body quantum chaos appears as the spontaneous symmetry breaking of unitarity in interacting quantum many-body systems. It has been shown that many-body level statistics, probed by the spectral form factor (SFF) defined as $K(\eta,t)=\langle|{\rm Tr}\, \exp(-\eta H + itH)|^2\rangle$, is dominated by a diffuson-type mode in a field theory analysis. The key finding of this Letter is that the "unitary" $\eta=0$ case is different from the $\eta \to 0^{\pm}$ limit, with the latter leading to a finite mass of these modes due to interactions. This mass suppresses a rapid exponential ramp in the SFF, which is responsible for the fast emergence of Poisson statistics in the non-interacting case, and gives rise to a non-trivial random matrix structure of many-body levels. The interaction-induced mass in the SFF shares similarities with the dephasing rate in the theory of weak localization and the Lyapunov exponent of the out-of-time-ordered correlators.