Many-body chaos and anomalous diffusion across thermal phase transitions in two dimensions

Abstract

Chaos is an important characterization of classical dynamical systems. How is chaos linked to the long-time dynamics of collective modes across phases and phase transitions? We address this by studying chaos across Ising and Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions in classical XXZ model. We show that spatio-temporal chaotic properties have crossovers across the transitions and distinct temperature dependence in the high and low-temperature phases which show normal and anomalous diffusions, respectively. Our results also provide new insights into the dynamics of interacting quantum systems in the semiclassical limit.