Statistics and complexity of wavefunction spreading in quantum dynamical systems

Abstract We consider the statistics of the results of a measurement of the spreading operator in the Krylov basis generated by the Hamiltonian of a quantum system starting from a specified initial pure state. We first obtain the probability distribution of the results of measurements of this spreadi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yichao Fu, Keun-Young Kim, Kunal Pal, Kuntal Pal
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: SpringerOpen 2025-06-01
Series:Journal of High Energy Physics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP06(2025)139
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Abstract We consider the statistics of the results of a measurement of the spreading operator in the Krylov basis generated by the Hamiltonian of a quantum system starting from a specified initial pure state. We first obtain the probability distribution of the results of measurements of this spreading operator at a certain instant of time, and compute the characteristic function of this distribution. We show that the moments of this characteristic function are related to the so-called generalised spread complexities, and obtain expressions for them in several cases when the Hamiltonian is an element of a Lie algebra. Furthermore, by considering a continuum limit of the Krylov basis, we show that the generalised spread complexities of higher orders have a peak in the time evolution for a random matrix Hamiltonian belonging to the Gaussian unitary ensemble. We also obtain an upper bound in the change in generalised spread complexity at an arbitrary time in terms of the operator norm of the Hamiltonian and discuss the significance of these results.
ISSN:1029-8479