Statistics of Schmidt coefficients and the simulability of complex quantum systems

We show that the transition from regular to chaotic spectral statistics in interacting many-body quantum systems has an unambiguous signature in the distribution of Schmidt coefficients dynamically generated from a generic initial state, and thus limits the efficiency of the time-dependent density-matrix renormalization-group algorithm. We investigate this mechanism on the tilted Bose-Hubbard model; however the emergence of universal spectral properties allows translation of our conclusions to generic many-body quantum systems.