Particle-time duality in the kicked Ising spin chain (Q2826698)

A duality property is investigated for a class of Hamiltonian models that may not exhibit a standard semiclassical behavior (no underlying classical dynamics at all). First, established for a model of coupled cat maps, this duality amounts to relating the trace of the unitary evolution of \(N\) spins in time \(T\), by a non-unitary evolution operator for \(T\) spins at time \(N\). The main benefit of this observation is that for a large number of particles, an access to the properties of the involved Floquet operator \(U_N\) is beyond the reach for large \(N\) (e.g., the computer time matters for excessively large matrices). For a small number of time steps contributing to a short overall time \(T\), the corresponding (nonunitary) \(U_T\) matrix size \(2^T\times 2^T\) is relatively small. That entails a quantification of various properties of the eigenvalue density of the Floquet operator and the spectral form factor in the limit of many particles but short times. An explanation is provided for the anomalous short-time behavior of the spectral form factor, previously mentioned in the literature.