We continue the study of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model in the Large $N$ limit. Following our formulation in terms of bi-local collective fields with dynamical reparametrization symmetry, we perform perturbative calculations around the conformal IR point.
We discuss large $N$ rules of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and the bi-local representation of holography of this theory. This is done by establishing $1/N$ Feynman rules in terms of bi-local propagators and vertices, which can be evaluated following the recent procedure of Polchinski and Rosenhaus. These rules can be interpreted as Witten type diagrams of the dual AdS theory, which we are able to define at IR fixed point and off.
We study a two-site Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with complex couplings, and identify a low temperature transition to a gapped phase characterized by a constant in temperature free energy. This transition is observed without introducing a coupling between the two sites, and only appears after ensemble average over the complex couplings. We propose a gravity interpretation of these results by constructing an explicit solution of Jackiw-Teitelboim (JT) gravity with matter: a two-dimensional Euclidean wormhole whose geometry is the double trumpet. This solution is sustained by imaginary sources for a marginal operator, without the need of a coupling between the two boundaries. As the temperature is decreased, there is a transition from a disconnected phase with two black holes to the connected wormhole phase, in qualitative agreement with the SYK observation. The expectation value of the marginal operator is an order parameter for this transition. This illustrates in a concrete setup how a Euclidean wormhole can arise from an average over field theory couplings.
We argue that stringy effects in a putative gravity-dual picture for SYK-like models are related to the branching time, a kinetic coefficient defined in terms of the retarded kernel. A bound on the branching time is established assuming that the leading diagrams are ladders with thin rungs. Thus, such models are unlikely candidates for sub-AdS holography. In the weak coupling limit, we derive a relation between the branching time, the Lyapunov exponent, and the quasiparticle lifetime using two different approximations.
We study the SYK model in the large $N$ limit beyond the replica-diagonal approximation. First we show that there are exact replica-nondiagonal solutions of the saddle point equations for $q=2$ for any finite replica number $M$. In the interacting $q=4$ case we are able to construct the numerical solutions, which are in one-to-one correspondence to the analytic solutions of the quadratic model. These solutions are singular in the $M to 0$ limit in both quadratic and quartic interaction cases. The calculations of the on-shell action at finite integer $M$ show that the nondiagonal replica-symmetric saddles are subleading in both quadratic and quartic cases. We also study replica-nondiagonal solutions of the SYK in the strong coupling limit. For arbitrary $q$ we show that besides the usual solutions of the replica-diagonal saddle point equations in the conformal limit, there are also replica-nondiagonal solutions for any value of $M$ (including zero). The specific configurations that we study, have factorized time and replica dependencies. The corresponding saddle point equations are separable at strong coupling, and can be solved using the Parisi ansatz from spin glass theory. We construct the solutions which correspond to the replica-symmetric case and to one-step replica symmetry breaking. We compute the regularized free energy on these solutions in the limit of zero replicas. It is observed that there are nondiagonal solutions with the regularized free energy lower than that of the standard diagonal conformal solution.
We consider pure states in the SYK model. These are given by a simple local condition on the Majorana fermions, evolved over an interval in Euclidean time to project on to low energy states. We find that diagonal correlators are exactly the same as thermal correlators at leading orders in the large $N$ expansion. We also describe off diagonal correlators that decay in time, and are given simply in terms of thermal correlators. We also solved the model numerically for low values of $N$ and noticed that subsystems become typically entangled after an interaction time. In addition, we identified configurations in two dimensional nearly-$AdS_2$ gravity with similar symmetries. These gravity configurations correspond to states with regions behind horizons. The region behind the horizon can be made accessible by modifying the Hamiltonian of the boundary theory using the the knowledge of the particular microstate. The set of microstates in the SYK theory with these properties generates the full Hilbert space.