Universal Growth of Krylov Complexity Across A Quantum Phase Transition

Abstract: We study the statistical properties of the spread complexity in the Krylov space of quantum systems driven across a quantum phase transition. Using the diabatic Magnus expansion, we map the evolution to an effective one-dimensional hopping model. For the transverse field Ising model, we establish an exact link between the growth of complexity and the Kibble-Zurek defect scaling: all cumulants of complexity exhibit the same power-law scaling as the defect density, with coefficients identical to the mean, and the full distribution asymptotically becomes Gaussian. These results yield general scaling arguments for the growth of complexity across arbitrary second-order quantum phase transitions.