Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

Quantum Complexity of Time Evolution with Chaotic Hamiltonians

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 1905.05765 v3 pith:KUWDKZAH submitted 2019-05-14 hep-th cs.CCquant-ph

classification hep-thcs.CCquant-ph
keywords complexitytimechaoticevolutionexponentialgeodesiclinearlocal
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
abstract

We study the quantum complexity of time evolution in large-$N$ chaotic systems, with the SYK model as our main example. This complexity is expected to increase linearly for exponential time prior to saturating at its maximum value, and is related to the length of minimal geodesics on the manifold of unitary operators that act on Hilbert space. Using the Euler-Arnold formalism, we demonstrate that there is always a geodesic between the identity and the time evolution operator $e^{-iHt}$ whose length grows linearly with time. This geodesic is minimal until there is an obstruction to its minimality, after which it can fail to be a minimum either locally or globally. We identify a criterion - the Eigenstate Complexity Hypothesis (ECH) - which bounds the overlap between off-diagonal energy eigenstate projectors and the $k$-local operators of the theory, and use it to show that the linear geodesic will at least be a local minimum for exponential time. We show numerically that the large-$N$ SYK model (which is chaotic) satisfies ECH and thus has no local obstructions to linear growth of complexity for exponential time, as expected from holographic duality. In contrast, we also study the case with $N=2$ fermions (which is integrable) and find short-time linear complexity growth followed by oscillations. Our analysis relates complexity to familiar properties of physical theories like their spectra and the structure of energy eigenstates and has implications for the hypothesized computational complexity class separations PSPACE $\nsubseteq$ BQP/poly and PSPACE $\nsubseteq$ BQSUBEXP/subexp, and the "fast-forwarding" of quantum Hamiltonians.

Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Evaporating Black Hole Interior and Complexity Evolution

    hep-th 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    In JT gravity with an end-of-the-world brane, the renormalized interior length — read as subsystem complexity — grows linearly, peaks around the Page time, and then decays exponentially, with growing relative fluctuat...

  2. Learning to Trace Seiberg Dualities

    hep-th 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

    Hybrid graph-transformer networks guiding A* and beam search find Seiberg-duality paths between ~10-node quivers more efficiently than BFS or pure physics heuristics, with a measured complexity breaking point.

  3. The Normalised Wigner Negativity Rate as a Second-Moment Probe of Infall in AdS$_3$

    hep-th 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Normalized Krylov-Wigner negativity rate matches Krylov variance growth and equals tidal stretch rate R ∝ C P_ρ if and only if Δ=1 in AdS3.

  4. Resolving Black Hole Singularities in Jackiw-Teitelboim Gravity

    hep-th 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    In JT gravity, the left confining potential required by spectral discreteness makes the wormhole length turn around and plateau, allowing boundary time to run past the would-be singularity and eliminating future horizons.

  5. On the stabilizer complexity of Hawking radiation

    hep-th 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    In the PSSY model, the Wigner negativity (stabilizer magic) of Hawking radiation is O(1) before the Page time and grows as sqrt(2/pi) exp((S_max - S_2)/2) afterward; a similar formula is proposed for holographic state...

  6. CFT Complexity and Penalty Factors

    hep-th 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A submersion-based method turns weighted generator costs into state-complexity metrics for CFTs, giving analytic formulas in simple limits and constraints on which weight choices are viable.

Pith tools