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arXiv:2504.21090 · Physical Review A

Necessity of entanglement for the typicality argument in statistical mechanics

Pedro Silva Correia, Gabriel Dias Carvalho, Thiago Rodrigues de Oliveira

Published May 21, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Typicality arguments replace the postulated mixed state ensembles of statistical mechanics with pure states sampled uniformly at random, explaining why most microstates of large systems exhibit thermal behavior. This paradigm has been revived in quantum contexts, where entanglement is deemed essential, but no clear quantitative link between entanglement structure and typicality has been established. Here, we study pure quantum states with controlled multipartite entanglement and show that when entanglement grows with system size $N$, fluctuations in macroscopic observables decay exponentially with $N$, whereas if entanglement remains finite, one recovers only the classical $1/\sqrt{N}$ suppression. Our work thus provides a quantitative connection between entanglement structure and the emergence of typicality, demonstrating that entanglement is crucial for thermalization in small quantum systems but unnecessary to justify equilibrium in macroscopic ensembles. This unifies classical and quantum foundations of statistical mechanics by pinpointing exactly when and why entanglement matters.

DOI
10.1103/nhvg-ckc6

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Typicality arguments replace the postulated mixed state ensembles of statistical mechanics with pure states sampled uniformly at random, explaining why most microstates of large systems exhibit thermal behavior. This paradigm has been revived in quantum contexts, where entanglement is deemed essential, but no clear quantitative link between entanglement structure and typicality has been established. Here, we study pure quantum states with controlled multipartite entanglement and show that when entanglement grows with system size NNN, fluctuations in macroscopic observables decay exponentially with NNN, whereas if entanglement remains finite, one recovers only the classical 1/N1/\sqrt{N}1/N​ suppression. Our work thus provides a quantitative connection between entanglement structure and the emergence of typicality, demonstrating that entanglement is crucial for thermalization in small quantum systems but unnecessary to justify equilibrium in macroscopic ensembles. This unifies classical and quantum foundations of statistical mechanics by pinpointing exactly when and why entanglement matters.
We investigate multipartite entanglement in a particular family of pure nnn-qubit hypergraph states through a statistical-mechanics framework, where the average bipartite purity maps onto an effective Hamiltonian of 2n2^n2n classical binary spins. In this correspondence, each hypergraph state uniquely corresponds to a classical spin configuration, while temperature serves as a control parameter that continuously interpolates between a uniform ensemble of random hypergraph states at high temperature and maximally multipartite entangled states (MMES) at zero temperature. Remarkably, the exponential of the zero-temperature entropy directly gives the number of MMES within the set of hypergraph states. For small system sizes (n≤5n \leq 5n≤5), we perform an exact enumeration, fully characterizing the energy landscape and associated thermodynamic observables, and validating known MMES counts. For larger systems (n=6n = 6n=6 and 777), where exact methods become computationally infeasible, we employ simulated annealing and parallel tempering algorithms to efficiently sample the exponentially large state space. Our analysis yields quantitative predictions of the number of MMES and reveals how entanglement is statistically distributed across the sets of hypergraph states. These results establish hypergraph states as an ideal platform for investigating multipartite entanglement through thermodynamic methods, offering both computational advances and physical insights into the structure of quantum entanglement in restricted families of quantum states.
A bstract The dynamics of quantum entanglement plays a central role in explaining the emergence of thermal equilibrium in isolated many-body systems. However, entanglement is notoriously hard to measure, and can in fact be “forged”: recent works have introduced a notion of pseudoentanglement describing ensembles of many-body states that, while only weakly entangled, cannot be efficiently distinguished from states with much higher entanglement, such as random states in the Hilbert space. This prompts the question: how much entanglement is truly necessary to achieve thermal equilibrium in quantum systems? In this work we address this question by introducing random circuit models of quantum dynamics that, at late times, equilibrate to pseudoentangled ensembles — a phenomenon we name ensemble pseudothermalization . These models replicate all the efficiently observable predictions of thermal equilibrium, while generating only a small (and tunable) amount of entanglement, thus deviating from the “maximum-entropy principle” that underpins thermodynamics. We examine (i) how a pseudoentangled ensemble on a small subsystem spreads to the whole system as a function of time, and (ii) how a pseudoentangled ensemble can be generated from an initial product state. We map the above problems onto a family of classical Markov chains on subsets of the computational basis. The mixing times of such Markov chains are related to the time scales at which the states produced from the dynamics become indistinguishable from Haar-random states at the level of each statistical moment, or number of copies. Based on a combination of rigorous bounds and conjectures supported by numerics, we argue that each Markov chain’s relaxation time and mixing time have different asymptotic behavior in the limit of large system size. This is a necessary condition for a cutoff phenomenon : an abrupt dynamical transition to equilibrium. We thus conjecture that our random circuits give rise to asymptotically sharp distinguishability transitions.
The emergence of classical behavior and the origin of thermal equilibrium are two central problems in the foundations of physics. In the standard accounts, both phenomena are typically explained through interactions with an external environment: decoherence suppresses quantum interference, while coupling to a thermal bath drives relaxation toward equilibrium. Over the last decades, however, it has become clear that equilibration and thermalization can arise even in fully isolated quantum systems, in the operational sense that the expectation values of relevant observables remain close to equilibrium values for most of the time. Here, we ask whether the same intrinsic equilibration mechanism can also account for the emergence of classical behavior. Using rigorous bounds on equilibration in closed systems, we derive sufficient conditions under which a time-evolved pure state becomes, for most times, operationally indistinguishable from a classical mixture associated with a chosen physical property. We identify two complementary routes to such operational classicality: either the chosen property almost commutes with the system Hamiltonian or the observables used to probe the system lose access to the remaining coherence after equilibration. Our results show that classical behavior need not be confined to the energy basis and may emerge even when substantial coherence remains present in the equilibrium state. This establishes a direct connection between two foundational questions: the origin of thermalization in isolated quantum systems and the quantum-to-classical transition
Characterizing the time evolution of generic quantum many-body systems is a fundamental challenge, as representing the exact state requires exponentially scaling computational resources. While hydrodynamics and statistical mechanics successfully simplify this task by predicting the expectation values of local observables, these macroscopic frameworks provide no information about nonlinear characteristics of the quantum state. In this work, we demonstrate that for systems exhibiting a timescale separation, with dynamics governed by the transport of conserved charges, this lost information can be systematically recovered. By constraining the maximum-entropy Scrooge ensemble solely by the system's slow modes, we accurately reconstruct complex, nonlinear quantum properties of the global time-evolved state, including the half-chain entanglement entropy and the participation entropy in the computational basis. Our results generalize the paradigm of canonical typicality, revealing that a hydrodynamically bottlenecked system behaves as a typical pure state within a dynamically restricted submanifold of the Hilbert space - a phenomenon we term global restricted typicality.
We investigate the mixed-state entanglement between two spins embedded in the XXZ Heisenberg chain under thermal equilibrium. By deriving an analytical expression for the entanglement of two-spin thermal states and extending this analysis to larger spin chains, we demonstrate that mixed-state entanglement is profoundly shaped by both disorder and temperature. Our results reveal a sharp distinction between many-body localized (MBL) and ergodic phases, with entanglement vanishing above different finite temperature thresholds. Furthermore, by analyzing non-adjacent spins, we uncover an approximate exponential decay of entanglement with separation. This work advances the understanding of the quantum-to-classical transition by linking the entanglement properties of small subsystems to the broader thermal environment, offering a explanation for the absence of entanglement in macroscopic systems. These findings provide critical insights into quantum many-body physics, bridging concepts from thermalization, localization, and quantum information theory.
We investigate multipartite entanglement via the statistical properties of pure quantum states of n-qubits. By analyzing the distribution of purity among balanced bipartitions, we compare Haar-typical states, uniformly distributed on the unit sphere of states, with Hadamard states, being characterized by equal weights in the computational basis. We analyze different ensembles of Hadamard states characterized by their phase distributions. Through analytical and numerical calculations, we show that Hadamard states exhibit, on average, a higher degree of entanglement than Haar-typical states. In addition, we show that a particular class of Hadamard states, characterized by real coefficients with alternating signs, known as hypergraph states, appears especially relevant in the search for maximally multipartite entangled states, both for their structural simplicity and the increased likelihood of sampling highly entangled states. These results identify Hadamard states as a tractable yet promising class for exploring multipartite entanglement structures and advancing the characterization of maximally multipartite entangled quantum states.