One of the outstanding problems in nonequilibrium physics is to precisely understand when and how physically relevant observables in many-body systems equilibrate under unitary time evolution. General equilibration results show that equilibration is generic provided that the initial state has overlap with sufficiently many energy levels. But results not referring to typicality which show that natural initial states actually fulfill this condition are lacking. In this work, we present stringent results for equilibration for systems in which Rényi entanglement entropies in energy eigenstates with finite energy density are extensive for at least some, not necessarily connected, subsystems. Our results reverse the logic of common arguments, in that we derive equilibration from a weak condition akin to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, which is usually attributed to thermalization in systems that are assumed to equilibrate in the first place. We put the findings into the context of studies of many-body localization and many-body scars.
One of the outstanding problems in nonequilibrium physics is to precisely understand when and how physically relevant observables in many-body systems equilibrate under unitary time evolution. General equilibration results show that equilibration is generic provided that the initial state has overlap with sufficiently many energy levels. But results not referring to typicality which show that natural initial states actually fulfill this condition are lacking. In this work, we present stringent results for equilibration for systems in which Rényi entanglement entropies in energy eigenstates with finite energy density are extensive for at least some, not necessarily connected, subsystems. Our results reverse the logic of common arguments, in that we derive equilibration from a weak condition akin to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, which is usually attributed to thermalization in systems that are assumed to equilibrate in the first place. We put the findings into the context of studies of many-body localization and many-body scars.
Using arguments built on ergodicity, we derive an analytical expression for the Renyi entanglement entropies which, we conjecture, applies to the finite-energy density eigenstates of chaotic many-body Hamiltonians. The expression is a universal function of the density of states and is valid even when the subsystem is a finite fraction of the total system-a regime in which the reduced density matrix is not thermal. We find that in the thermodynamic limit, only the von Neumann entropy density is independent of the subsystem to the total system ratio V_{A}/V, while the Renyi entropy densities depend nonlinearly on V_{A}/V. Surprisingly, Renyi entropies S_{n} for n>1 are convex functions of the subsystem size, with a volume law coefficient that depends on V_{A}/V, and exceeds that of a thermal mixed state at the same energy density. We provide two different arguments to support our results: the first one relies on a many-body version of Berry's formula for chaotic quantum-mechanical systems, and is closely related to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. The second argument relies on the assumption that for a fixed energy in a subsystem, all states in its complement allowed by the energy conservation are equally likely. We perform an exact diagonalization study on quantum spin-chain Hamiltonians to test our analytical predictions.
One of the main questions of research on quantum many-body systems following unitary out of equilibrium dynamics is to find out how local expectation values equilibrate in time. For non-interacting models, this question is rather well understood. However, the best known bounds for general quantum systems are vastly crude, scaling unfavorable with the system size. Nevertheless, empirical and numerical evidence suggests that for generic interacting many-body systems, generic local observables, and sufficiently well-behaved states, the equilibration time does not depend strongly on the system size, but only the precision with which this occurs does. In this discussion paper, we aim at giving very simple and plausible arguments for why this happens. While our discussion does not yield rigorous results about equilibration time scales, we believe that it helps to clarify the essential underlying mechanisms, the intuition and important figure of merits behind equilibration. We then connect our arguments to common assumptions and numerical results in the field of equilibration and thermalization of closed quantum systems, such as the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis as well as rigorous results on interacting quantum many-body systems. Finally, we complement our discussions with numerical results - both in the case of examples and counter-examples of equilibrating systems.
Proving thermalization from the unitary evolution of closed quantum systems is one of the oldest questions that is still only partially resolved. Efforts led to various versions of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), which implies thermalization under certain conditions. Whether the ETH holds in specific systems is however difficult to verify from the microscopic description of the system. In this work, we focus on thermalization under local Hamiltonians of low-entanglement initial states, which are operationally accessible in many natural physical settings, including schemes for testing thermalization in experiments and quantum simulators. We prove thermalization of these states under precise conditions that have operational significance. More specifically, motivated by arguments of unavoidable finite resolution, we define a random energy smoothing on local Hamiltonians that leads to local thermalization when the initial state has low entanglement. Finally we show that this transformation affects neither the Gibbs state locally nor, under generic smoothness conditions on the spectrum, the short-time dynamics.
Proving thermalization from the unitary evolution of a closed quantum system is one of the oldest questions that is still nowadays only partially resolved. Several efforts have led to various formulations of what is called the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, which leads to thermalization under certain conditions on the initial states. These conditions, however, are sensitive to the precise formulation of the hypothesis. In this work, we focus on the important case of low entanglement initial states, which are operationally accessible in many natural physical settings, including experimental schemes for testing thermalization and for quantum simulation. We prove thermalization of these states under precise conditions that have operational significance. More specifically, motivated by arguments of unavoidable finite resolution, we define a random energy smoothing on local Hamiltonians that leads to local thermalization when the initial state has low entanglement. Finally we show that such a transformation affects neither the Gibbs state locally nor, under generic smoothness conditions on the spectrum, the short-time dynamics.
When a generic quantum system is prepared in a simple initial condition, it typically equilibrates toward a state that can be described by a thermal ensemble. A known exception is localized systems that are non-ergodic and do not thermalize; however, local observables are still believed to become stationary. Here we demonstrate that this general picture is incomplete by constructing product states that feature periodic high-fidelity revivals of the full wavefunction and local observables that oscillate indefinitely. The system neither equilibrates nor thermalizes. This is analogous to the phenomenon of weak ergodicity breaking due to many-body scars and challenges aspects of the current phenomenology of many-body localization, such as the logarithmic growth of the entanglement entropy. To support our claim, we combine analytic arguments with large-scale tensor network numerics for the disordered Heisenberg chain. Our results hold for arbitrarily long times in chains of 160 sites up to machine precision.
Quantum systems governed by unitary and reversible microscopic dynamics may nevertheless exhibit equilibration, in the sense that some effective description becomes time-independent. Standard equilibration results usually consider two separate situations: system-environment structures, in which the composite system evolves unitarily while the system of interest equilibrates, and restricted measurements, such as coarse-grained POVMs and observables, in which the measurement statistics equilibrate. Here, we bring these descriptions into a common state-level framework using the concept of generalized subsystems, where the accessible effective state appears as the output of a quantum channel acting on the microscopic state. We derive bounds showing that generalized subsystems equilibrate when their dimension is small compared with the effective dimension of the discarded microscopic information. We further show that this condition is met for typical initial states in large subspaces and that the resulting equilibrium description is largely insensitive to microscopic initial details. The framework recovers the usual equilibration bounds for ordinary subsystems and finite families of POVMs. As an example, we also introduce a finite-resolution energy channel that maps unresolved microscopic energy levels into effective energy levels, thereby making residual effective coherences explicit and showing how spectral multiplicities constrain those coherences while strengthening equilibration. Our results provide a unified state-level formulation of quantum equilibration under general forms of limited accessible information.