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arXiv:2501.08967 · Physical Review Research

Eigenstate thermalization to nonmonotonic distributions in strongly interacting chaotic lattice gases

Vladimir Yurovsky, Amichay Vardi

Published Dec 17, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

We find nonmonotonic equilibrium energy distributions, qualitatively different from the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein forms, in strongly interacting many-body chaotic systems. The effect emerges in systems with finite energy spectra, supporting both positive and negative temperatures, in the regime of quantum ergodicity. The results are supported by exact diagonalization calculations for chaotic Fermi-Hubbard and Bose-Hubbard models, when they have Wigner-Dyson statistics of energy spectra and demonstrate eigenstate thermalization. The proposed effects may be observed in experiments with cold atoms in optical lattices.

DOI
10.1103/4cq3-nfb2

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We find nonmonotonic equilibrium energy distributions, qualitatively different from the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein forms, in strongly interacting many-body chaotic systems. The effect emerges in systems with finite energy spectra, supporting both positive and negative temperatures, in the regime of quantum ergodicity. The results are supported by exact diagonalization calculations for chaotic Fermi-Hubbard and Bose-Hubbard models, when they have Wigner-Dyson statistics of energy spectra and demonstrate eigenstate thermalization. The proposed effects may be observed in experiments with cold atoms in optical lattices.
We numerically study a Bose-Hubbard ring of finite size with disorder containing a finite number of bosons that are subject to an on-site two-body interaction. Our results show that moderate interactions induce dynamical thermalization in this isolated system. In this regime the individual many-body eigenstates are well described by the standard thermal Bose-Einstein distribution for well-defined values of the temperature and the chemical potential, which depend on the eigenstate under consideration. We show that the dynamical thermalization conjecture works well at both positive and negative temperatures. The relations to quantum chaos, quantum ergodicity, and the Åberg criterion are also discussed.
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We report an example of a many-body system, derived from the double kicked top (DKT), with non-chaotic yet mean-ergodic dynamics that displays \textit{strong} eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in the quantum regime. The analysis addresses a key open question: whether \textit{strong} ETH is a quantum analog of ergodicity (or mean-ergodicity). Despite non-chaotic dynamics, the fluctuations of the diagonal matrix elements of an observable scale as D−1/2D^{-1/2}D−1/2, where DDD denotes the Hilbert space dimension. Furthermore, the off-diagonal matrix elements show parameter-independent distribution, together with a smooth function fO(Eˉ,ω)f_O(\bar{E}, ω)fO​(Eˉ,ω) that becomes nearly uniform in the large-kθk_θkθ​ domain. Our findings show that even mean-ergodic and non-chaotic systems can exhibit \textit{strong} ETH.
We show that a bounded, isolated quantum system of many particles in a specific initial state will approach thermal equilibrium if the energy eigenfunctions which are superposed to form that state obey Berry's conjecture. Berry's conjecture is expected to hold only if the corresponding classical system is chaotic, and essentially states that the energy eigenfunctions behave as if they were Gaussian random variables. We review the existing evidence, and show that previously neglected effects substantially strengthen the case for Berry's conjecture. We study a rarefied hard-sphere gas as an explicit example of a many-body system which is known to be classically chaotic, and show that an energy eigenstate which obeys Berry's conjecture predicts a Maxwell-Boltzmann, Bose-Einstein, or Fermi-Dirac distribution for the momentum of each constituent particle, depending on whether the wave functions are taken to be nonsymmetric, completely symmetric, or completely antisymmetric functions of the positions of the particles. We call this phenomenon eigenstate thermalization. We show that a generic initial state will approach thermal equilibrium at least as fast as O(\ensuremath{\Elzxh}/\ensuremath{\Delta})${\mathit{t}}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}1}$, where \ensuremath{\Delta} is the uncertainty in the total energy of the gas. This result holds for an individual initial state; in contrast to the classical theory, no averaging over an ensemble of initial states is needed. We argue that these results constitute a sound foundation for quantum statistical mechanics.
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The emergence of statistical mechanics from quantum dynamics is conventionally understood through quantum chaos, the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH), and canonical typicality, which together explain the thermal behavior of local observables in quantum many-body systems. We provide a distinct mechanism in which, for a quantum many-body system under strong random perturbation, the chaotic behavior of the system's eigenvectors and a constraint on the total energy directly generate a canonical ensemble for the entire system. The canonical ensemble occurs as the first moment of the Porter-Thomas distribution of the system's chaotic eigenstates, and the constraint on the total energy sets the temperature in the ensemble. This yields canonically distributed expectation values without invoking ETH, a microcanonical ensemble, or a subsystem-bath partition for local and global observables. We numerically demonstrate the mechanism for the 1D transverse-field Ising model by showing canonically distributed eigenstate projectors and spin-spin correlators with distinctive temperature dependence of the correlation length. An implementation of this thermalization approach on a quantum computer can be utilized for thermal state preparation.