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arXiv:2111.12484 · Physical Review Letters

Eigenstate Thermalization in Long-Range Interacting Systems

Shoki Sugimoto, Ryusuke Hamazaki, Masahito Ueda

Published Jul 14, 2022• 31 citations
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Abstract

Motivated by recent ion experiments on tunable long-range interacting quantum systems [Neyenhuis et al., Sci. Adv. 3, e1700672 (2017)SACDAF2375-254810.1126/sciadv.1700672], we test the strong eigenstate thermalization hypothesis for systems with power-law interactions ∼1/r^{α}. We numerically demonstrate that the strong eigenstate thermalization hypothesis typically holds, at least for systems with α≥0.6, which include Coulomb, monopole-dipole, and dipole-dipole interactions. Compared with short-range interacting systems, the eigenstate expectation value of a generic local observable is shown to deviate significantly from its microcanonical ensemble average for long-range interacting systems. We find that Srednicki's ansatz breaks down for α≲1.0, at least for relatively large system sizes.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.129.030602

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According to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), even isolated quantum systems can thermalize because the eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations of typical observables vanish in the limit of large systems. Of course, isolated systems are by nature finite and the main way of computing such quantities is through numerical evaluation for finite-size systems. Therefore, the finite-size scaling of the fluctuations of eigenstate expectation values is a central aspect of the ETH. In this work, we present numerical evidence that for generic nonintegrable systems these fluctuations scale with a universal power law D-1/2 with the dimension D of the Hilbert space. We provide heuristic arguments, in the same spirit as the ETH, to explain this universal result. Our results are based on the analysis of three families of models and several observables for each model. Each family includes integrable members and we show how the system size where the universal power law becomes visible is affected by the proximity to integrability.
Quantum thermalization of closed systems -- i.e. the relaxation of local properties to their thermodynamic value along the Hamiltonian evolution -- is generically expected in non-integrable systems at finite energy density. In this work we show that quantum spin systems with at least one spin component coupled through long-range ferromagnetic interactions, and a second spin component coupled to a field, cannot in general thermalize to a paramagnetic state whenever they have a finite, negative energy per spin. The long-range interactions we consider decay as a power law of the distance, ∼r−α\sim r^{-α}∼r−α with α<dα< dα<d, where ddd is the number of spatial dimensions of the system. The lack of thermalization is generic to an infinite family of Hamiltonians, and it is not associated to any form of integrability. It can instead be understood by the anomalous features of the thermodynamics of the system in the paramagnetic phase, which cannot be reflected in the properties of the eigenstates. This leads to a breakdown of eigenstate typicality and of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Interestingly, the non-thermal states emerging at long times in the dynamics display long-range multipartite entanglement, elevating the breakdown of thermalization to a resource.
We verify that the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) holds universally for locally interacting quantum many-body systems. Introducing random matrix ensembles with interactions, we numerically obtain a distribution of maximum fluctuations of eigenstate expectation values for different realizations of interactions. This distribution, which cannot be obtained from the conventional random matrix theory involving nonlocal correlations, demonstrates that an overwhelming majority of pairs of local Hamiltonians and observables satisfy the ETH with exponentially small fluctuations. The ergodicity of our random matrix ensembles breaks down because of locality.
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We introduce a random sampling method for testing the weak Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (wETH) that is particularly useful for large, sparse Hamiltonians. We test the method on a well-studied Rydberg atom system that exhibits both two- and three-body dipole-dipole interactions. Our results show that our method allows for the study of system sizes significantly beyond the limits of exact diagonalization. We find that the fluctuations in eigenstate expectation values decay as the Hilbert space dimension D−1/2D^{-1/2}D−1/2, consistent with wETH and in agreement with previous numerical results.