It is well known that the spectral form factor (SFF) of a possibly degenerate many-body Hamiltonian can be identified with a planar random walk taking steps of unequal length. In this paper we push this identification further and propose to study the chaotic content of a Hamiltonian $H$ via its associated random walk seen as a fractal, using the tools of fractal geometry. In particular, we conjecture that for chaotic Hamiltonians the Hausdorff dimension of the frontier of the corresponding random walk approaches the universal value $d_F=4/3$—the same value obtained when the random walk describes a Wiener process. Our numerical simulations for nonintegrable models confirm this expectation while for quasifree integrable models we obtain a value $d_F=1$. Additionally, we numerically show that “Bethe-Ansatz walkers” fall into a category similar to the nonintegrable walkers. To motivate this conjecture we consider many-body Hamiltonians with degenerate but rationally independent eigenvalues. We prove that if the degeneracies satisfy certain Lyapunov conditions, the random walk becomes a Wiener process, $d_F=4/3$, and the distribution of the SFF becomes Gaussian. This is the familiar Gaussian approximation for the SFF which we show to be violated at very low temperature. We also compute the moments of the SFF exactly under milder hypotheses thus solving the classical problem of determining the moments of a random walker taking steps of unequal lengths. Finally, we consider quasifree Fermionic models with possibly degenerate but rationally independent one-particle spectra. We show that in this case the distribution of the SFF becomes lognormal and also give the exact form of the moments under milder hypotheses.

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• Quantum chaos
• Random walks
• Fractals
• Quantum many-body systems
• Heisenberg model
• Random matrix theory
• Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model