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arXiv:2008.01085 · Physical review. E

Eigenstate thermalization for observables that break Hamiltonian symmetries and its counterpart in interacting integrable systems

Tyler LeBlond, Marcos Rigol

Published Dec 7, 2020• 38 citations
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Abstract

We study the off-diagonal matrix elements of observables that break the translational symmetry of a spin-chain Hamiltonian, and as such connect energy eigenstates from different total quasimomentum sectors. We consider quantum-chaotic and interacting integrable points of the Hamiltonian, and focus on average energies at the center of the spectrum. In the quantum-chaotic model, we find that there is eigenstate thermalization; specifically, the matrix elements are Gaussian distributed with a variance that is a smooth function of ω=E_{α}-E_{β} (E_{α} are the eigenenergies) and scales as 1/D (D is the Hilbert space dimension). In the interacting integrable model, we find that the matrix elements exhibit a skewed log-normal-like distribution and have a variance that is also a smooth function of ω that scales as 1/D. We study in detail the low-frequency behavior of the variance of the matrix elements to unveil the regimes in which it exhibits diffusive or ballistic scaling. We show that in the quantum-chaotic model the behavior of the variance is qualitatively similar for matrix elements that connect eigenstates from the same versus different quasimomentum sectors. We also show that this is not the case in the interacting integrable model for observables whose translationally invariant counterpart does not break integrability if added as a perturbation to the Hamiltonian.

DOI
10.1103/physreve.102.062113

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We study the off-diagonal matrix elements of observables that break the translational symmetry of a spin-chain Hamiltonian, and as such connect energy eigenstates from different total quasimomentum sectors. We consider quantum-chaotic and interacting integrable points of the Hamiltonian, and focus on average energies at the center of the spectrum. In the quantum-chaotic model, we find that there is eigenstate thermalization; specifically, the matrix elements are Gaussian distributed with a variance that is a smooth function of ω=E_{α}-E_{β} (E_{α} are the eigenenergies) and scales as 1/D (D is the Hilbert space dimension). In the interacting integrable model, we find that the matrix elements exhibit a skewed log-normal-like distribution and have a variance that is also a smooth function of ω that scales as 1/D. We study in detail the low-frequency behavior of the variance of the matrix elements to unveil the regimes in which it exhibits diffusive or ballistic scaling. We show that in the quantum-chaotic model the behavior of the variance is qualitatively similar for matrix elements that connect eigenstates from the same versus different quasimomentum sectors. We also show that this is not the case in the interacting integrable model for observables whose translationally invariant counterpart does not break integrability if added as a perturbation to the Hamiltonian.
We study the matrix elements of local and nonlocal operators in the single-particle eigenstates of two paradigmatic quantum-chaotic quadratic Hamiltonians; the quadratic Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK2) model and the three-dimensional Anderson model below the localization transition. We show that they display eigenstate thermalization for normalized observables. Specifically, we show that the diagonal matrix elements exhibit vanishing eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations and that their variance is proportional to the inverse Hilbert space dimension. We also demonstrate that the ratio between the variance of the diagonal and the off-diagonal matrix elements is 2, as predicted by the random matrix theory. We study distributions of matrix elements of observables and establish that they need not be Gaussian. We identify the class of observables for which the distributions are Gaussian.
We derive the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) from a random matrix Hamiltonian by extending the model introduced by Deutsch (1991 Phys. Rev. A 43 2046). We approximate the coupling between a subsystem and a many-body environment by means of a random Gaussian matrix. We show that a common assumption in the analysis of quantum chaotic systems, namely the treatment of eigenstates as independent random vectors, leads to inconsistent results. However, a consistent approach to the ETH can be developed by introducing an interaction between random wave-functions that arises as a result of the orthonormality condition. This approach leads to a consistent form for off-diagonal matrix elements of observables. From there we obtain the scaling of time-averaged fluctuations of generic observables with system size for which we calculate an analytic form in terms of the inverse participation ratio. The analytic results are compared to exact diagonalizations of a quantum spin chain for different physical observables in multiple parameter regimes.
We study the bipartite von Neumann entanglement entropy and matrix elements of local operators in the eigenstates of an interacting integrable Hamiltonian (the paradigmatic spin-1/2 XXZ chain), and we contrast their behavior with that of quantum chaotic systems. We find that the leading term of the average (over all eigenstates in the zero magnetization sector) eigenstate entanglement entropy has a volume-law coefficient that is smaller than the universal (maximal entanglement) one in quantum chaotic systems. This establishes the entanglement entropy as a powerful measure to distinguish integrable models from generic ones. Remarkably, our numerical results suggest that the volume-law coefficient of the average entanglement entropy of eigenstates of the spin-1/2 XXZ Hamiltonian is very close to, or the same as, the one for translationally invariant quadratic fermionic models. We also study matrix elements of local operators in the eigenstates of the spin-1/2 XXZ Hamiltonian at the center of the spectrum. For the diagonal matrix elements, we show evidence that the support does not vanish with increasing system size, while the average eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations vanish in a power-law fashion. For the off-diagonal matrix elements, we show that they follow a distribution that is close to (but not quite) log-normal, and that their variance is a well-defined function of ω=E_{α}-E_{β} ({E_{α}} are the eigenenergies) proportional to 1/D, where D is the Hilbert space dimension.
We derive the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) from a random matrix Hamiltonian by extending the model introduced by Deutsch (1991 Phys. Rev. A 43 2046). We approximate the coupling between a subsystem and a many-body environment by means of a random Gaussian matrix. We show that a common assumption in the analysis of quantum chaotic systems, namely the treatment of eigenstates as independent random vectors, leads to inconsistent results. However, a consistent approach to the ETH can be developed by introducing an interaction between random wave-functions that arises as a result of the orthonormality condition. This approach leads to a consistent form for off-diagonal matrix elements of observables. From there we obtain the scaling of time-averaged fluctuations of generic observables with system size for which we calculate an analytic form in terms of the inverse participation ratio. The analytic results are compared to exact diagonalizations of a quantum spin chain for different physical observables in multiple parameter regimes.
We study the matrix elements of few-body observables, focusing on the off-diagonal ones, in the eigenstates of the two-dimensional transverse field Ising model. By resolving all symmetries, we relate the onset of quantum chaos to the structure of the matrix elements. In particular, we show that a general result of the theory of random matrices, namely, the value 2 of the ratio of variances (diagonal to off-diagonal) of the matrix elements of Hermitian operators, occurs in the quantum chaotic regime. Furthermore, we explore the behavior of the off-diagonal matrix elements of observables as a function of the eigenstate energy differences and show that it is in accordance with the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis ansatz.
We study the statistical properties of the off-diagonal matrix elements of observables in the energy eigenstates of integrable quantum systems. They have been found to be dense in the spin-1/2 XXZ chain, while they are sparse in noninteracting systems. We focus on the quasimomentum occupation of hard-core bosons in one dimension and show that the distributions of the off-diagonal matrix elements are well described by generalized Gamma distributions, in both the presence and absence of translational invariance but not in the presence of localization. We also show that the results obtained for the off-diagonal matrix elements of observables in the spin-1/2 XXZ model are well described by a generalized Gamma distribution.