Characterizing quantum chaoticity of kicked spin chains

Quantum many-body systems are commonly considered as quantum chaotic if their spectral statistics, such as the level spacing distribution, agree with those of random matrix theory. Using the example of the kicked Ising chain we demonstrate that even if both level spacing distribution and eigenvector statistics agree well with random matrix predictions, the entanglement entropy deviates from the expected Page curve. To explain this observation we propose a new measure of the effective spin interactions and obtain the corresponding random matrix result. By this the deviations of the entanglement entropy can be attributed to significantly different behavior of the $k$-spin interactions compared with RMT.