Fisher zeroes and the fluctuations of the spectral form factor of chaotic systems

The spectral form factor of quantum chaotic systems has the familiar ‘ramp + plateau’ form. Techniques to determine its form in the semiclassical [1] or the thermodynamic [2] limit have been devised, in both cases based on the average over an energy range or an ensemble of systems. For a single instance, fluctuations are large, do not go away in the limit, and depend on the element of the ensemble itself, thus seeming to question the whole procedure. Considered as the modulus of a partition function in complex inverse temperature β_R + iβ_I (β_I ≡ τ the time), the spectral form factor has regions of Fisher zeroes, the analogue of Yang-Lee zeroes for the complex temperature plane. The large spikes in the spectral form factor are in fact a consequence of near-misses of the line parametrized by β_I to these zeroes. The largest spikes are indeed extensive and extremely sensitive to details, but we show that they are both exponentially rare and exponentially thin. Motivated by this, and inspired by the work of Derrida on the Random Energy Model, we study here a modified model of random energy levels in which we introduce level repulsion. We also check that the mechanism giving rise to spikes is the same in the SYK model.