Statistical and dynamical aspects of quantum chaos in a kicked Bose-Hubbard dimer

Abstract: Systems of interacting bosons in double-well potentials, modeled by two-site Bose-Hubbard models, are of significant theoretical and experimental interest and attracted intensive studies in contexts ranging from many-body physics and quantum dynamics to the onset of quantum chaos. In this work we systematically study a kicked two-site Bose-Hubbard model (Bose-Hubbard dimer) with the on-site potential difference being periodically modulated. Our model can be equivalently represented as a kicked Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model and thus displays different dynamical behaviors from the kicked top model. By analyzing spectral statistics of Floquet operator, we unveil that the system undergoes a transition from regularity to chaos with increasing the interaction strength. Then based on semiclassical approximation and the analysis of R\'{e}nyi entropy of coherent states in the basis of Floquet operator eigenstates, we reveal the local chaotic features of our model, which indicate the existence of integrable islands even in the deep chaotic regime. The semiclassical analysis also suggests that the system in chaotic regime may display different dynamical behavior depending on the choice of initial states. Finally, we demonstrate that dynamical signatures of chaos can be manifested by studying dynamical evolution of local operators and out of time order correlation function as well as the entanglement entropy. Our numerical results exhibit the richness of dynamics of the kicked Bose-Hubbard dimer in both regular and chaotic regimes as the initial states are chosen as coherent spin states located in different locations of phase space.