It is commonly expected that for quantum chaotic many body systems, the statistical properties approach those of random matrices when increasing the system size. We demonstrate for various kicked spin-$1/2$ chain models that the average eigenstate entanglement indeed approaches the random matrix result. However, the distribution of the eigenstate entanglement differs significantly. While for autonomous systems such deviations are expected, they are surprising for the more scrambling kicked systems. Similar deviations occur in a tensor-product random matrix model with all-to-all interactions. Therefore, we attribute the origin of the deviations for the kicked spin-$1/2$ chain models to the tensor-product structure of the Hilbert spaces. As a consequence, this would mean that such many body systems cannot be described by the standard random matrix ensembles.

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• Entanglement entropy
• Quantum chaos
• 1-dimensional spin chains
• Floquet systems
• Random matrix theory