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arXiv:1810.01258 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Note on ETH of descendant states in 2D CFT

Wu-zhong Guo, Feng-Li Lin, Jiaju Zhang

Published Jan 1, 2019• 23 citations
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Abstract

Abstract We investigate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) of highly excited descendant states in two-dimensional large central charge c conformal field theory. We use operator product expansion of twist operators to calculate the short interval expansions of entanglement entropy and relative entropy for an interval of length ℓ up to order ℓ 12. Using these results to ensure ETH of a heavy state when compared with the canonical ensemble state up to various orders of c, we get the constraints on the expectation values of the first few quasiprimary operators in the vacuum conformal family at the corresponding order of c. Similarly, we also obtain the constraints from the expectation values of the first few Korteweg-de Vries charges. We check these constraints for some types of special descendant excited states. Among the descendant states we consider, we find that at most only the leading order ones of the ETH constraints can be satisfied for the descendant states that are slightly excited on top of a heavy primary state. Otherwise, the ETH constraints are violated for the descendant states that are heavily excited on top of a primary state.

DOI
10.1007/jhep01(2019)152

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Abstract We investigate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) of highly excited descendant states in two-dimensional large central charge c conformal field theory. We use operator product expansion of twist operators to calculate the short interval expansions of entanglement entropy and relative entropy for an interval of length ℓ up to order ℓ 12. Using these results to ensure ETH of a heavy state when compared with the canonical ensemble state up to various orders of c, we get the constraints on the expectation values of the first few quasiprimary operators in the vacuum conformal family at the corresponding order of c. Similarly, we also obtain the constraints from the expectation values of the first few Korteweg-de Vries charges. We check these constraints for some types of special descendant excited states. Among the descendant states we consider, we find that at most only the leading order ones of the ETH constraints can be satisfied for the descendant states that are slightly excited on top of a heavy primary state. Otherwise, the ETH constraints are violated for the descendant states that are heavily excited on top of a primary state.
We investigate a weak version of subsystem eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) for a two-dimensional large central charge conformal field theory by comparing the local equivalence of high energy state and thermal state of canonical ensemble. We evaluate the single-interval Rényi entropy and entanglement entropy for a heavy primary state in short interval expansion. We verify the results of Rényi entropy by two different replica methods. We find nontrivial results at the eighth order of short interval expansion, which include an infinite number of higher order terms in the large central charge expansion. We then evaluate the relative entropy of the reduced density matrices to measure the difference between the heavy primary state and thermal state of canonical ensemble, and find that the aforementioned nontrivial eighth order results make the relative entropy unsuppressed in the large central charge limit. By using Pinsker’s and Fannes-Audenaert inequalities, we can exploit the results of relative entropy to yield the lower and upper bounds on trace distance of the excited-state and thermal-state reduced density matrices. Our results are consistent with subsystem weak ETH, which requires the above trace distance is of power-law suppression by the large central charge. However, we are unable to pin down the exponent of power-law suppression. As a byproduct we also calculate the relative entropy to measure the difference between the reduced density matrices of two different heavy primary states.
We calculate various quantities that characterize the dissimilarity of reduced density matrices for a short interval of length ell\\ellell in a two-dimensional (2D) large central charge conformal field theory (CFT). These quantities include the R\\'enyi entropy, entanglement entropy, relative entropy, Jensen-Shannon divergence, as well as the Schatten 2-norm and 4-norm. We adopt the method of operator product expansion of twist operators, and calculate the short interval expansion of these quantities up to order of ell9\\ell^9ell9 for the contributions from the vacuum conformal family. The formal forms of these dissimilarity measures and the derived Fisher information metric from contributions of general operators are also given. As an application of the results, we use these dissimilarity measures to compare the excited and thermal states, and examine the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) by showing how they behave in high temperature limit. This would help to understand how ETH in 2D CFT can be defined more precisely. We discuss the possibility that all the dissimilarity measures considered here vanish when comparing the reduced density matrices of an excited state and a generalized Gibbs ensemble thermal state. We also discuss ETH for a microcanonical ensemble thermal state in a 2D large central charge CFT, and find that it is approximately satisfied for a small subsystem and violated for a large subsystem.
We calculate various quantities that characterize the dissimilarity of reduced density matrices for a short interval of length ℓ in a two-dimensional (2D) large central charge conformal field theory (CFT). These quantities include the Rényi entropy, entanglement entropy, relative entropy, Jensen-Shannon divergence, as well as the Schatten 2-norm and 4-norm. We adopt the method of operator product expansion of twist operators, and calculate the short interval expansion of these quantities up to order of ℓ9 for the contributions from the vacuum conformal family. The formal forms of these dissimilarity measures and the derived Fisher information metric from contributions of general operators are also given. As an application of the results, we use these dissimilarity measures to compare the excited and thermal states, and examine the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) by showing how they behave in high temperature limit. This would help to understand how ETH in 2D CFT can be defined more precisely. We discuss the possibility that all the dissimilarity measures considered here vanish when comparing the reduced density matrices of an excited state and a generalized Gibbs ensemble thermal state. We also discuss ETH for a microcanonical ensemble thermal state in a 2D large central charge CFT, and find that it is approximately satisfied for a small subsystem and violated for a large subsystem.
We develop a Fock-space formulation that reduces expectation values of vacuum-family quasi-primaries in qKdV eigenstates of arbitrary highest-weight conformal families to a free-bosonic problem, and employ it to test the generalized eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (GETH), in 2D conformal field theories with large central charge ccc. We demonstrate that the first two quantum Korteweg--de Vries (qKdV) charges Q1Q_1Q1​ and Q3Q_3Q3​ lift all degeneracies except along at most countably many curves in the (c,Δ)(c,Δ)(c,Δ) plane, where ΔΔΔ is the highest weight of the conformal family, so that the full-qKdV simultaneous eigenstates are unambiguously determined by Q1Q_1Q1​ and Q3Q_3Q3​. Based on this, a near-complete toolkit for testing in the vacuum conformal family or falsifying the general form of GETH, i.e. equating qKdV eigenstates and thermal states of the generalized Gibbs ensemble in the sense of expectations of local observables, is provided in this paper, through the infinite tower of qKdV charges. A stronger form of the GETH, namely that all expectations of local observables of a definite level should be expressible of qKdV charges but not contain microscopic eigenstate information, is directly falsified at subleading order in the large-ccc expansion. At levels 6 and 8 in the vacuum family, expectation values of quasi-primaries in simultaneous eigenstates of the qKdV charges are not fixed by first finitely many qKdV charges, and microscopic information of the eigenstate is required.
Infinite-dimensional conformal symmetry in two dimensions leads to integrability of 2D conformal field theories (CFTs) by giving rise to an infinite tower of local conserved quantum Korteweg-de Vries (qKdV) charges in involution. We discuss how the presence of conserved charges constrains equilibration in 2D CFTs. We propose that in the thermodynamic limit large central charge 2D CFTs satisfy generalized eigenstate thermalization, with the values of qKdV charges forming a complete set of thermodynamically relevant quantities, which unambiguously determine expectation values of all local observables from the vacuum family. Equivalence of ensembles further provides that local properties of an eigenstate can be described by the generalized Gibbs ensemble that includes only qKdV charges. In the case of a general initial state, upon equilibration, the emerging generalized Gibbs ensemble will necessarily include negative chemical potentials and holographically will be described by a quasiclassical black hole with quantum soft hair.
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) provides a way to understand how an isolated quantum mechanical system can be approximated by a thermal density matrix. We find a class of operators in (1+1)-dimensional conformal field theories, consisting of quasiprimaries of the identity module, which satisfy the hypothesis only at the leading order in large central charge. In the context of subsystem ETH, this plays a role in the deviation of the reduced density matrices, corresponding to a finite energy density eigenstate from its hypothesized thermal approximation. The universal deviation in terms of the square of the trace-square distance goes as the eighth power of the subsystem fraction and is suppressed by powers of inverse central charge (c). Furthermore, the nonuniversal deviations from subsystem ETH are found to be proportional to the heavy-light-heavy structure constants which are typically exponentially suppressed in sqrt[h/c], where h is the conformal scaling dimension of the finite energy density state. We also examine the effects of the leading finite-size corrections.