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  • Open Access

Growth of block-diagonal operators and symmetry-resolved Krylov complexity

Pawel Caputa1,2,3, Giuseppe Di Giulio1,*, and Tran Quang Loc1

  • 1The Oscar Klein Centre and Department of Physics, Stockholm University, AlbaNova, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
  • 2Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, Kitashirakawa Oiwakecho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan
  • 3Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, Pasteura 5, 02-093 Warsaw, Poland

  • *Contact author: giuseppe.di-giulio@fysik.su.se

Phys. Rev. Research 7, 043055 – Published 15 October, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/9v9v-54zv

Abstract

This work addresses how the growth of invariant operators is influenced by their underlying symmetry structure. For this purpose, we introduce the symmetry-resolved Krylov complexity, which captures the time evolution of each block into which an operator, invariant under a given symmetry, can be decomposed. We find that, at early times, the complexity of the full operator is equal to the average of the symmetry-resolved contributions. At later times, however, the interplay among different charge sectors becomes more intricate. In general, the symmetry-resolved Krylov complexity depends on the charge sector, although in some cases this dependence disappears, leading to a form of Krylov complexity equipartition. Our analysis lays the groundwork for a broader application of symmetry structures in the study of Krylov space complexities with implications for thermalization and universality in many-body quantum systems.

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