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arXiv:1408.3589

Stron eigenstate thermalization hypothesis

Garry Goldstein, Natan Andrei

Published Aug 15, 2014• 1 citation
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Abstract

We present a generalization of the ETH conjecture. Using this generalization we are able to derive the fact that an arbitrary eigenstate of a general many body system may be used to represent microcanonical ensemble in any many body experiment that involves only local operators and projectors onto eigenstates of the system Hamiltonian. In particular we extend the ETH to include some non-local operators. We present a derivation of this conjecture in the case of a many body model whose Hamiltonian is composed of two parts: an integrable Hamiltonian and a small but finite Gaussian perturbation.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1408.3589

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We present a generalization of the ETH conjecture. Using this generalization we are able to derive the fact that an arbitrary eigenstate of a general many body system may be used to represent microcanonical ensemble in any many body experiment that involves only local operators and projectors onto eigenstates of the system Hamiltonian. In particular we extend the ETH to include some non-local operators. We present a derivation of this conjecture in the case of a many body model whose Hamiltonian is composed of two parts: an integrable Hamiltonian and a small but finite Gaussian perturbation.
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 mmm-body operators with m<α∗Nm < α_{\ast} Nm<α∗​N in the thermodynamic limit for some nonzero constant α∗>0α_{\ast} > 0α∗​>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.
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The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) explains why nonintegrable quantum many-body systems thermalize internally if the Hamiltonian lacks symmetries. If the Hamiltonian conserves one quantity ("charge"), the ETH implies thermalization within a charge sector-in a microcanonical subspace. But quantum systems can have charges that fail to commute with each other and so share no eigenbasis; microcanonical subspaces may not exist. Furthermore, the Hamiltonian will have degeneracies, so the ETH need not imply thermalization. We adapt the ETH to noncommuting charges by positing a non-Abelian ETH and invoking the approximate microcanonical subspace introduced in quantum thermodynamics. Illustrating with SU(2) symmetry, we apply the non-Abelian ETH in calculating local operators' time-averaged and thermal expectation values. In many cases, we prove, the time average thermalizes. However, we find cases in which, under a physically reasonable assumption, the time average converges to the thermal average unusually slowly as a function of the global-system size. This work extends the ETH, a cornerstone of many-body physics, to noncommuting charges, recently a subject of intense activity in quantum thermodynamics.
Recently, the full version of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) has been systematized using free probability. In this paper, we present a detailed discussion of the free-cumulants approach to many-body dynamics within the microcanonical ensemble. Differences between the latter and canonical averages are known to manifest in the time-dependent fluctuations of extensive operators. Thus, the microcanonical ensemble is essential to extend the application of free probability to the broad class of extensive observables. We numerically demonstrate the validity of our approach in a nonintegrable spin-chain Hamiltonian for extensive observables at finite-energy density. Our results confirm the full ETH properties, specifically the suppression of crossing contributions and the factorization of noncrossing ones, thus demonstrating that the microcanonical free cumulants encode ETH smooth correlations for both local and extensive observables.
The emergence of statistical mechanics from quantum dynamics is conventionally understood through quantum chaos, the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH), and canonical typicality, which together explain the thermal behavior of local observables in quantum many-body systems. We provide a distinct mechanism in which, for a quantum many-body system under strong random perturbation, the chaotic behavior of the system's eigenvectors and a constraint on the total energy directly generate a canonical ensemble for the entire system. The canonical ensemble occurs as the first moment of the Porter-Thomas distribution of the system's chaotic eigenstates, and the constraint on the total energy sets the temperature in the ensemble. This yields canonically distributed expectation values without invoking ETH, a microcanonical ensemble, or a subsystem-bath partition for local and global observables. We numerically demonstrate the mechanism for the 1D transverse-field Ising model by showing canonically distributed eigenstate projectors and spin-spin correlators with distinctive temperature dependence of the correlation length. An implementation of this thermalization approach on a quantum computer can be utilized for thermal state preparation.