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Spectral anomalies and broken symmetries in maximally chaotic quantum maps

by Laura Shou, Amit Vikram, Victor Galitski

Submission summary

Authors (as registered SciPost users):

Laura Shou

Abstract

Spectral statistics such as the level spacing statistics and spectral form factor (SFF) are widely expected to accurately identify ``ergodicity'', including the presence of underlying macroscopic symmetries, in generic quantum systems ranging from quantized chaotic maps to interacting many-body systems. By studying various quantizations of maximally chaotic maps that break a discrete classical symmetry upon quantization, we demonstrate that this approach can be misleading and fail to detect macroscopic symmetries. Notably, the same classical map can exhibit signatures of different random matrix symmetry classes in short-range spectral statistics depending on the quantization. While the long-range spectral statistics encoded in the early time ramp of the SFF are more robust and correctly identify macroscopic symmetries in several common quantizations, we also demonstrate analytically and numerically that the presence of Berry-like phases in the quantization leads to spectral anomalies, which break this correspondence. Finally, we provide numerical evidence that long-range spectral rigidity remains directly correlated with ergodicity in the quantum dynamical sense of visiting a complete orthonormal basis.