Exploring the Spectral Edge in SYK Models

Abstract: Previous work on Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity has shown that, at low temperatures, the annealed entropy becomes negative and departs from the quenched entropy. From the perspective of the random-matrix theory (RMT) dual of JT gravity, this effect is encoded in the level spacing statistics of the spectral edge that is universally described by the Airy model. At low temperature, the quenched entropy exhibits a power law dependence determined by the symmetry class of the RMT ensemble. Here we study the same question in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model which possesses much more structure than RMT. Through numerical simulations, we find that the level spacing statistics of the SYK model match the relevant RMT ensembles even near the spectral edge, thus leading to an agreement with the RMT prediction for the quenched entropy at low temperatures. We also show similar effects in supersymmetric wormholes filled with matter, which is modeled by the $\mathcal N = 2$ supersymmetric SYK model. Numerically extracting the spectral edge properties of the BPS operators allows us to compute the quenched entanglement entropy of the wormhole in the large particle number limit.