Thermalization of Randomly Coupled SYK Models

Abstract: We investigate the thermalization of Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models coupled via random interactions following quenches from the perspective of entanglement. Previous studies have shown that when a system of two SYK models coupled by random two-body terms is quenched from the thermofield double state with sufficiently low effective temperature, the R\'enyi entropies do not saturate to the expected thermal values in the large-$N$ limit. Using numerical large-$N$ methods, we first show that the R\'enyi entropies in a pair SYK models coupled by two-body terms can thermalize, if quenched from a state with sufficiently high effective temperature, and hence exhibit state-dependent thermalization. In contrast, SYK models coupled by single-body terms appear to always thermalize. We provide evidence that the subthermal behavior in the former system is likely a large-$N$ artifact by repeating the quench for finite $N$ and finding that the saturation value of the R\'enyi entropy extrapolates to the expected thermal value in the $N \to \infty$ limit. Finally, as a finer grained measure of thermalization, we compute the late-time spectral form factor of the reduced density matrix after the quench. While a single SYK dot exhibits perfect agreement with random matrix theory, both the quadratically and quartically coupled SYK models exhibit slight deviations.