Finite-size prethermalization at the chaos-to-integrable crossover

Abstract: We investigate the infinite temperature dynamics of the complex Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model (SYK$4$) complimented with a single particle hopping term (SYK$_2$), leading to the chaos-to-integrable crossover of the many-body eigenstates. Due to the presence of the all-to-all connected SYK$_2$ term, a non-equilibrium prethermal state emerges for a finite time window $t{th}\propto 2^{a/{\lambda}^{2/5}}$ that scales with the relative interaction strength $\lambda$, between the SYK terms before eventually exhibiting thermalization for all $\lambda$. The scaling of the plateau with $\lambda$ is consistent with the many-body Fock space structure of the time-evolved wave function. In the integrable limit, the wavefunction in the Fock space has a stretched exponential dependence on distance. On the contrary, in the SYK$_4$ limit, it is distributed equally over the Fock space points characterizing the ergodic phase at long times.