Particle-time duality in the kicked Ising spin chain

Abstract

We demonstrate that the dynamics of kicked spin chains possess a remarkable duality property. The trace of the unitary evolution operator for N spins at time T is related to one of a non-unitary evolution operator for T spins at time N. We characterize this dual operator by its spectrum. Using the duality relation we obtain the oscillating part of the density of states for a large number of spins. Furthermore, the duality relation explains the anomalous short-time behavior of the spectral form factor previously observed in the literature.