Spectral form factors of clean and random quantum Ising chains

Abstract

We compute the spectral form factor of two integrable quantum-critical many-body systems in one spatial dimension. The spectral form factor of the quantum Ising chain is periodic in time in the scaling limit described by a conformal field theory; we also compute corrections from lattice effects and deviation from criticality. Criticality in the random Ising chain is described by rare regions associated with a strong randomness fixed point, and these control the long-time limit of the spectral form factor.