Thermalization and Possible Signatures of Quantum Chaos in Complex Crystalline Materials

Abstract

Analyses of thermal diffusivity data on complex insulators and on strongly correlated electron systems hosted in similar complex crystal structures suggest that quantum chaos is a good description for thermalization processes in these systems, particularly in the high temperature regime where the many phonon bands and their interactions dominate the thermal transport. Here we observe that for these systems diffusive thermal transport is controlled by a universal Planckian time scale \(\tau\sim \hbar/k_BT\), and a unique velocity \(v_E\). Specifically, \(v_E \approx v_{ph} \) for complex insulators, and \(v_{ph} \lesssim v_E \ll v_{F}\) in the presence of strongly correlated itinerant electrons (\(v_{ph}\) and \(v_F\) are the phonons and electrons velocities respectively). For the complex correlated electron systems we further show that charge diffusivity, while also reaching the Planckian relaxation bound, is largely dominated by the Fermi velocity of the electrons, hence suggesting that it is only the thermal (energy) diffusivity that describes chaos diffusivity.