Equilibration of noninteracting photons and quantum signatures of chaos
Phys. Rev. B 112, 134304 – Published 8 October, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/tmw1-vry7
Abstract
Equilibration plays a fundamental role in our understanding of statistical mechanics and the long-time dynamics of many-body systems. In quantum systems, the route to equilibration is intimately related to level repulsion and quantum signatures of chaos that are encoded in their unitary evolution. Chaotic quantum systems exhibit level statistics characteristic of ensembles of random matrices. In this work, we demonstrate that single-particle chaos leads to equilibration of many noninteracting photons. We show that the underlying mechanisms for equilibration are operator spreading and quantum interference. More specifically, we demonstrate that the unitary dynamics of a general Floquet system implemented using single-mode phase shifters and multiport beamsplitters leads to equilibration of photons. We propose a realistic photonic implementation of the multiparticle kicked rotor, which is a Floquet system that we use as a concrete example of our general approach.
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Corrections
19 November, 2025
Correction: An incorrect version of Figure 1 was used for publication and has now been replaced with the correct version.
