Operator complexity: a journey to the edge of Krylov space

Abstract: Heisenberg time evolution under a chaotic many-body Hamiltonian $H$ transforms an initially simple operator into an increasingly complex one, as it spreads over Hilbert space. Krylov complexity, or `K-complexity', quantifies this growth with respect to a special basis, generated by $H$ by successive nested commutators with the operator. In this work we study the evolution of K-complexity in finite-entropy systems for time scales greater than the scrambling time $t_s>\log (S)$. We prove rigorous bounds on K-complexity as well as the associated Lanczos sequence and, using refined parallelized algorithms, we undertake a detailed numerical study of these quantities in the SYK$_4$ model, which is maximally chaotic, and compare the results with the SYK$_2$ model, which is integrable. While the former saturates the bound, the latter stays exponentially below it. We discuss to what extent this is a generic feature distinguishing between chaotic vs. integrable systems.