Chaos in the Bose-Hubbard model and random two-body Hamiltonians

We investigate the chaotic phase of the Bose-Hubbard model (Pausch et al 2021 Phys. Rev. Lett. 126 150601) in relation to the bosonic embedded random matrix ensemble, which mirrors the dominant few-body nature of many-particle interactions, and hence the Fock space sparsity of quantum many-body systems. The energy dependence of the chaotic regime is well described by the bosonic embedded ensemble, which also reproduces the Bose-Hubbard chaotic eigenvector features, quantified by the expectation value and eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations of fractal dimensions. Despite this agreement, in terms of the fractal dimension distribution, these two models depart from each other and from the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble as Hilbert space grows. These results provide further evidence of a way to discriminate among different many-body Hamiltonians in the chaotic regime.