We investigate the onset of "eigenstate thermalization" and the crossover to ergodicity in a system of one-dimensional fermions with increasing interaction. We analyze the fluctuations in the expectation values of most relevant few-body operators with respect to eigenstates. It turns out that these are intimately related to the inverse participation ratio of eigenstates displayed in the operator eigenbasis. Based on this observation, we find good evidence that eigenstate thermalization should set in even for vanishingly small perturbations in the thermodynamic limit.
We investigate the onset of "eigenstate thermalization" and the crossover to ergodicity in a system of one-dimensional fermions with increasing interaction. We analyze the fluctuations in the expectation values of most relevant few-body operators with respect to eigenstates. It turns out that these are intimately related to the inverse participation ratio of eigenstates displayed in the operator eigenbasis. Based on this observation, we find good evidence that eigenstate thermalization should set in even for vanishingly small perturbations in the thermodynamic limit.
Using the ergodicity principle for the expectation values of several types of observables, we investigate the thermalization process in isolated fermionic systems.These are described by the two-body random ensemble, which is a paradigmatic model to study quantum chaos and especially the dynamical transition from integrability to chaos.By means of exact diagonalizations we analyze the relevance of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis as well as the influence of other factors, such as the energy and structure of the initial state, or the dimension of the Hilbert space.We also obtain analytical expressions linking the degree of thermalization for a given observable with the so-called number of principal components for transition strengths originating at a given energy, with the dimensions of the whole Hilbert space and microcanonical energy shell, and with the correlations generated by the observable.As the strength of the residual interaction is increased, an order-to-chaos transition takes place, and we show that the onset of Wigner spectral fluctuations, which is the standard signature of chaos, is not sufficient to guarantee thermalization in finite systems.When all the signatures of chaos are fulfilled, including the quasicomplete delocalization of eigenfunctions, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is the mechanism responsible for the thermalization of certain types of observables, such as (linear combinations of) occupancies and strength function operators.Our results also suggest that fully chaotic systems will thermalize relative to most observables in the thermodynamic limit.
Using the ergodicity principle for the expectation values of several types of observables, we investigate the thermalization process in isolated fermionic systems. These are described by the two-body random ensemble, which is a paradigmatic model to study quantum chaos and especially the dynamical transition from integrability to chaos. By means of exact diagonalizations we analyze the relevance of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis as well as the influence of other factors, such as the energy and structure of the initial state, or the dimension of the Hilbert space. We also obtain analytical expressions linking the degree of thermalization for a given observable with the so-called number of principal components for transition strengths originating at a given energy, with the dimensions of the whole Hilbert space and microcanonical energy shell, and with the correlations generated by the observable. As the strength of the residual interaction is increased, an order-to-chaos transition takes place, and we show that the onset of Wigner spectral fluctuations, which is the standard signature of chaos, is not sufficient to guarantee thermalization in finite systems. When all the signatures of chaos are fulfilled, including the quasicomplete delocalization of eigenfunctions, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is the mechanism responsible for the thermalization of certain types of observables, such as (linear combinations of) occupancies and strength function operators. Our results also suggest that fully chaotic systems will thermalize relative to most observables in the thermodynamic limit.
Integrable quantum systems of finite size are generically robust against weak enough integrability-breaking perturbations, but become quantum chaotic and thermalizing if the integrability breaking is strong enough. We argue that the onset of quantum chaos can be described as a Fock-space delocalization process, with the eigenstates of the integrable system being taken as the Fock states. The integrability-breaking perturbation introduces hopping in this Fock space, and chaos sets in when this hopping delocalizes the many-body eigenstates in this space. Depending on the range of the dominant Fock-space hopping, delocalization can occur either through a crossover or via a transition that becomes sharp in the appropriate large-system dynamic limit. In either case, the perturbation strength at the onset of chaos scales to zero in the usual thermodynamic limit, with a size dependence that we estimate analytically and compute numerically for a few specific models. We also identify two intermediate finite-size-dependent regimes: There is generally an intermediate nonchaotic regime in which integrability is broken strongly enough to produce some systemwide many-body resonances but not enough to thermalize the system. In spatially extended systems (but not in quantum dots) there is also a crossover or transition between chaotic regimes where the ratio of the system size to the mean free path of the quasiparticles of the integrable system is small versus large compared to unity.
We study thermalization in a disordered one-dimensional interacting bosonic system described by the Aubry-Andre model using full exact diagonalization. We find a broad chaotic energy window where the system's eigenstates satisfy the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH), demonstrated by the smooth energy dependence of observables like entanglement entropy and local particle number, whose fluctuations decrease with system size. Dynamically, we investigate the equilibration of initial Fock states and find that thermalization is not universal. The key finding is a direct and nontrivial correlation between an initial state's delocalization in the energy eigenbasis quantified by the Participation Ratio (PR) and its subsequent equilibration. States with a high PR consistently evolve toward the microcanonical ensemble prediction, whereas those exhibiting a low PR display deviations whose magnitude inversely correlates with the PR value. This connection is quantitatively confirmed by the trace distance, providing a powerful, experimentally relevant diagnostic for predicting which initial states will reach thermal equilibrium.
We explore the role of the initial state on the onset of thermalization in isolated quantum many-body systems after a quench. The initial state is an eigenstate of an initial Hamiltonian ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{H}}_{I}$ and it evolves according to a different final Hamiltonian ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{H}}_{F}$. If the initial state has a chaotic structure with respect to ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{H}}_{F}$, i.e., if it fills the energy shell ergodically, thermalization is certain to occur. This happens when ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{H}}_{I}$ is a full random matrix, because its states projected onto ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{H}}_{F}$ are fully delocalized. The results for the observables then agree with those obtained with thermal states at infinite temperature. However, finite real systems with few-body interactions, as the ones considered here, are deprived of fully extended eigenstates, even when described by a nonintegrable Hamiltonian. We examine how the initial state delocalizes as it gets closer to the middle of the spectrum of ${\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{H}}_{F}$, causing the observables to approach thermal averages, be the models integrable or chaotic. Our numerical studies are based on initial states with energies that cover the entire lower half of the spectrum of one-dimensional Heisenberg spin-1/2 systems.
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), which asserts that every eigenstate of a many-body quantum system is indistinguishable from a thermal ensemble, plays a pivotal role in understanding thermalization of isolated quantum systems. Yet, no evidence has been obtained as to whether the ETH holds for all few-body operators in a chaotic system; such few-body operators include key quantities in statistical mechanics, such as the total magnetization, the momentum distributions, and their low-order thermal and quantum fluctuations. Here, we formulate a conjecture that for a generic nonintegrable system the ETH holds simultaneously for all m-body operators with m<α∗N in the thermodynamic limit for some nonzero constant α∗>0. We first show the existence of such nontrivial constants for idealized (pseudo) random-matrix descriptions of many-body eigenstates. We then verify the conjecture for generic spin, Bose, and Fermi systems with local and few-body interactions by large-scale numerical calculations. Our results imply that generic systems satisfy the ETH simultaneously for all few-body operators, including their thermal and quantum fluctuations.