Spectral Chaos from a Fluctuating Quantum Horizon

Abstract

Black holes are conjectured to be maximally chaotic, with their quantum spectra expected to exhibit universal random-matrix correlations. This expectation, however, has so far rested largely on holographic descriptions or on many-body models in which randomness is introduced rather than derived from the microscopic degrees of freedom of the horizon itself. In the horizon matrix model, the fuzzy sphere supports highly degenerate parton states whose multiplicity accounts for the black-hole entropy. We show that quantum fluctuations of the horizon geometry lift this degeneracy and generate an ensemble of one-parton Hamiltonians. Both the operator structure and the rank-dependent covariance of this ensemble are determined by the microscopic model, rather than fixed by quenched couplings. Despite this structured covariance, the resulting spectra exhibit GOE, GUE, and GSE statistics dictated by their antiunitary symmetry classes, with the adjacent-gap statistic becoming increasingly self-averaging with matrix size. The model also realizes the universal Pandey--Mehta orthogonal-to-unitary crossover, with the crossover scale determined by the microscopic geometric covariance. A rank-resolved variance analysis shows that the fluctuation strength remains broadly distributed across tensor ranks up to the microscopic cutoff, providing a microscopic basis for the observed Wigner--Dyson universality and effectively nonlocal dynamics. The antiunitary symmetry acts directly on the fuzzy-sphere geometry, so the Dyson class of a conditional Hamiltonian is determined by the antiunitary symmetry of the underlying quantum geometry. This provides a microscopic counterpart of the Stanford--Witten relation between geometry and random-matrix universality in JT gravity. These results establish a microscopic route from quantum horizon geometry to black-hole spectral chaos.