Spread complexity and quantum chaos for periodically driven spin chains

Abstract

The complexity of quantum states under dynamical evolution can be investigated by studying the spread with time of the state over a predefined basis. It is known that this complexity is minimized by choosing the Krylov basis, thus defining the spread complexity. We study the dynamics of spread complexity for quantum maps using the Arnoldi iterative procedure. The main illustrative quantum many-body model we use is the periodically kicked Ising spinchain with nonintegrable deformations, a chaotic system where we look at both local and nonlocal interactions. In the various cases, we find distinctive behavior of the Arnoldi coefficients and spread complexity for regular versus chaotic dynamics: suppressed fluctuations in the Arnoldi coefficients as well as larger saturation value in spread complexity in the chaotic case. We compare the behavior of the Krylov measures with that of standard spectral diagnostics of chaos. We also study the effect of changing the driving frequency on the complexity saturation.