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arXiv:2403.06655 · The European Physical Journal C

Thermalization in Krylov basis

Mohsen Alishahiha, Mohammad Javad Vasli

Published Jan 21, 2025• 17 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract We study thermalization in closed non-integrable quantum systems using the Krylov basis. We demonstrate that for thermalization to occur, the matrix representation of typical local operators in the Krylov basis should exhibit a specific tridiagonal form with all other elements in the matrix being exponentially small, reminiscent of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Within this framework, we propose that the nature of thermalization, whether weak or strong, can be examined by the infinite time average of the Krylov complexity. Moreover, we analyze the variance of Lanczos coefficients as another probe for the nature of thermalization. One observes that although the variance of Lanczos coefficients may capture certain features of thermalization, it is not as effective as the infinite time average of complexity.

DOI
10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-13757-2

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Abstract We study thermalization in closed non-integrable quantum systems using the Krylov basis. We demonstrate that for thermalization to occur, the matrix representation of typical local operators in the Krylov basis should exhibit a specific tridiagonal form with all other elements in the matrix being exponentially small, reminiscent of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Within this framework, we propose that the nature of thermalization, whether weak or strong, can be examined by the infinite time average of the Krylov complexity. Moreover, we analyze the variance of Lanczos coefficients as another probe for the nature of thermalization. One observes that although the variance of Lanczos coefficients may capture certain features of thermalization, it is not as effective as the infinite time average of complexity.
Quantum chaotic systems are conjectured to display a spectrum whose fine-grained features (gaps and correlations) are well described by random matrix theory (RMT). We propose and develop a complementary version of this conjecture: quantum chaotic systems display a Lanczos spectrum whose local means and covariances are well described by RMT. To support this proposal, we first demonstrate its validity in examples of chaotic and integrable systems. We then show that for Haar-random initial states in RMTs the mean and covariance of the Lanczos spectrum suffice to produce the full long-time behavior of general survival probabilities including the spectral form factor, as well as the spread complexity. In addition, for initial states with continuous overlap with energy eigenstates, we analytically find the long-time averages of the probabilities of Krylov basis elements in terms of the mean Lanczos spectrum. This analysis suggests a notion of eigenstate complexity, the statistics of which differentiate integrable systems and classes of quantum chaos. Finally, we clarify the relation between spread complexity and the universality classes of RMT by exploring various values of the Dyson index and Poisson distributed spectra.
We study whether a generic isolated quantum system initially set out of equilibrium can be considered as localized close to its initial state. Our approach considers the time evolution in the Krylov basis, which maps the system's dynamics onto that of a particle moving in a one-dimensional lattice where both the energy in the lattice sites and the tunneling from one lattice site to the next are inhomogeneous. By tying the dynamical propagation in the Krylov basis to that in the basis of microstates, we infer qualitative criteria that allow distinguishing systems that remain localized close to their initial state from systems that undergo quantum thermalization. These criteria are system-dependent and involve the expectation values and standard deviations of both the coupling strengths between Krylov states and their energy. We verify their validity by inspecting two cases: Anderson localization as a function of dimension and the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a many-body dipolar spin system. We finally investigate the Wigner surmise and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis that have both been proposed to characterize quantum chaotic systems. We show that when the average value of the nondiagonal terms in the Lanczos matrix is large compared to their fluctuations and to the fluctuations of the energy expectation values, which typically corresponds to delocalized quantum systems according to our criteria, there can be level repulsion of eigenenergies (also known as spectral rigidity), similar to that of the Wigner-Dyson statistics of energy levels; and we also demonstrate that in the same regime, the expectation values of typical local observables only weakly vary as a function of eigenstates, an important condition for the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Our demonstration assumes that, in the chaotic regime, the observable is sufficiently diagonal in the basis of Krylov states. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
A bstract Continuing the previous initiatives [1, 2], we pursue the exploration of operator growth and Krylov complexity in dissipative open quantum systems. In this paper, we resort to the bi-Lanczos algorithm generating two bi-orthogonal Krylov spaces, which individually generate non-orthogonal subspaces. Unlike the previously studied Arnoldi iteration, this algorithm renders the Lindbladian into a purely tridiagonal form, thus opening up a possibility to study a wide class of dissipative integrable and non-integrable systems by computing Krylov complexity at late times. Our study relies on two specific systems, the dissipative transverse-field Ising model (TFIM) and the dissipative interacting XXZ chain. We find that, for the weak coupling, initial Lanczos coefficients can efficiently distinguish integrable and chaotic evolution before the dissipative effect sets in, which results in more fluctuations in higher Lanczos coefficients. This results in the equal saturation of late-time complexity for both integrable and chaotic cases, making the notion of late-time chaos dubious.
We continue the analysis of the Krylov complexity in the IP matrix model. In a previous paper, for a fundamental operator, it was shown that at zero temperature, the Krylov complexity oscillates and does not grow, but in the infinite temperature limit, the Krylov complexity grows exponentially in time as ∼exp⁡(O(t))\sim \exp\left( {\mathcal{O}\left( {\sqrt{t}}\right)} \right)∼exp(O(t​)). We study how the Krylov complexity changes from a zero-temperature oscillation to an infinite-temperature exponential growth. At low temperatures, the spectral density is approximated as collections of infinite Wigner semicircles. We showed that this infinite collection of branch cuts yields linear growth to the Lanczos coefficients and gives exponential growth of the Krylov complexity. Thus the IP model for any nonzero temperature shows exponential growth for the Krylov complexity even though the Green function decays by a power law in time. We also study the Lanczos coefficients and the Krylov complexity in the IOP matrix model taking into account the 1/N21/N^21/N2 corrections. There, the Lanczos coefficients are constants and the Krylov complexity does not grow exponentially as expected.
Understanding the evolution towards thermal equilibrium of an isolated quantum system is at the foundation of statistical mechanics and a subject of interest in such diverse areas as cold atom physics or the quantum mechanics of black holes. Since a pure state can never evolve into a thermal density matrix, the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) has been put forward by Deutsch and Srednicki as a way to explain this apparent thermalization, similarly to what the ergodic theorem does in classical mechanics. In this paper this hypothesis is tested numerically. First, it is observed that thermalization happens in a subspace of states (the Krylov subspace) with dimension much smaller than that of the total Hilbert space. We check numerically the validity of ETH in such a subspace, for a system of hard core bosons on a two-dimensional lattice. We then discuss how well the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian projected on the Krylov subspace represent the true eigenstates. This discussion is aided by bringing the projected Hamiltonian to the tridiagonal form and interpreting it as an Anderson localization problem for a finite one-dimensional chain. We also consider thermalization of a subsystem and argue that generation of a large entanglement entropy can lead to a thermal density matrix for the subsystem well before the whole system thermalizes. Finally, we comment on possible implications of ETH in quantum gravity.
Using a Krylov-subspace time evolution algorithm, we simulate the real-time dynamics of translation invariant non-integrable finite spin rings to quite long times with high accuracy. We systematically study the finite-size deviation between the resulting equilibrium state and the thermal state, and we highlight the importance of the energy variance on the deviations. We find that the deviations are well described by the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, and that the von Neumann entropy correction scaling is the square of the local operator scaling. We reveal also an area law contribution to the relaxed von Neumann entropy, which we connect to the mutual information between the considered subsystem and its immediate environment. We also find that local observables relax towards equilibrium exponentially with a relaxation time scale that grows linearly with system length and is somewhat independent of the local operator, but depends strongly on the energy of the initial state, with the fastest relaxation times found towards one end of the overall energy spectrum. To contrast this behaviour we also study domain wall initial states, which exhibit clear diffusive behaviour, with a Thouless time scaling quadratically with the systems size, leading to a rather precise estimate for the diffusion constant for states in the vicinity of the middle of the energy spectrum.