Recent advances in quantum simulation have enabled the discovery of novel forms of universality in quantum many-body dynamics. In this Review, we discuss deep thermalization and Hilbert space ergodicity--two recently discovered phenomena characterized by the emergence of distributions of quantum states that are "maximally random" in a precise sense. They offer a new perspective on how irreversible statistical mechanics arises from reversible unitary quantum dynamics, going beyond conventional theories of quantum thermalization and equilibration. We review a unifying framework, rooted in quantum information theory and principles of maximum entropy, that explains the different forms of ergodicity which arise under various physical constraints. We discuss open questions and active research directions, including generalizations beyond ensembles of pure quantum states, phase transitions in deep thermalization tied to deeper forms of ergodicity-breaking, connections to broader topics in quantum thermalization and ergodicity, and applications in quantum information science, such as for benchmarking or tomography.
Recent advances in quantum simulation have enabled the discovery of novel forms of universality in quantum many-body dynamics. In this Review, we discuss deep thermalization and Hilbert space ergodicity--two recently discovered phenomena characterized by the emergence of distributions of quantum states that are "maximally random" in a precise sense. They offer a new perspective on how irreversible statistical mechanics arises from reversible unitary quantum dynamics, going beyond conventional theories of quantum thermalization and equilibration. We review a unifying framework, rooted in quantum information theory and principles of maximum entropy, that explains the different forms of ergodicity which arise under various physical constraints. We discuss open questions and active research directions, including generalizations beyond ensembles of pure quantum states, phase transitions in deep thermalization tied to deeper forms of ergodicity-breaking, connections to broader topics in quantum thermalization and ergodicity, and applications in quantum information science, such as for benchmarking or tomography.
We report universal statistical properties displayed by ensembles of pure states that naturally emerge in quantum many-body systems. Specifically, two classes of state ensembles are considered: those formed by (i) the temporal trajectory of a quantum state under unitary evolution or (ii) the quantum states of small subsystems obtained by partial, local projective measurements performed on their complements. These cases, respectively, exemplify the phenomena of “Hilbert-space ergodicity” and “deep thermalization.” In both cases, the resultant ensembles are defined by a simple principle: The distributions of pure states have maximum entropy, subject to constraints such as energy conservation, and effective constraints imposed by thermalization. We present and numerically verify quantifiable signatures of this principle by deriving explicit formulas for all statistical moments of the ensembles, proving the necessary and sufficient conditions for such universality under widely accepted assumptions, and describing their measurable consequences in experiments. We further discuss information-theoretic implications of the universality: Our ensembles have maximal information content while being maximally difficult to interrogate, establishing that generic quantum state ensembles that occur in nature hide (scramble) information as strongly as possible. Our results generalize the notions of Hilbert-space ergodicity to time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics and deep thermalization from infinite to finite effective temperature. Our work presents new perspectives to characterize and understand universal behaviors of quantum dynamics using statistical and information-theoretic tools. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We present several discoveries in quantum many-body dynamics and their applications. We discover types of universal randomness that emerge in many-body dynamics, now known as "deep thermalization" and "Hilbert space ergodicity." These discoveries have been enabled by recent advances in programmable quantum simulators, in particular their capability to perform measurements with unprecedented precision in both space and time. This universality allows for a number of practical applications adapted from the quantum information literature, including benchmarking, noise channel learning and state tomography. These applications rely on naturally-realized quantum dynamics and do not require fine-tuned controls. Hence, they are applicable to analog quantum simulators, and we realize several of these protocols in experiment. These results in emergent randomness are broadly applicable to generic many-body systems. We also discover new structures in specific systems realized in modern experimental platforms, namely in a lattice gauge theory realized in neutral atom arrays, and in optical lattice quantum gas microscopes. Finally, we identify a new type of structure present in the emergent randomness, governed by the presence of anti-unitary symmetries. Together, these results advance our understanding of quantum many-body dynamics and illustrate that much remains to be discovered in this active field of research.
We report a phase transition in the projected ensemble-the collection of postmeasurement wave functions of a local subsystem obtained by measuring its complement. The transition emerges in systems undergoing random permutation dynamics, a type of quantum time evolution wherein computational basis states are shuffled without creating superpositions. It separates a phase exhibiting deep thermalization, where the projected ensemble is distributed over Hilbert space in a maximally entropic fashion (Haar random), from a phase where it is minimally entropic ("classical bit-string ensemble"). Crucially, this deep thermalization transition is invisible to the subsystem's density matrix, which always exhibits thermalization to infinite temperature across the phase diagram. Through a combination of analytical arguments and numerical simulations, we show that the transition is tuned by the total amount of coherence injected by the input state and the measurement basis, and is exhibited robustly across different microscopic models. Our findings represent a novel form of ergodicity-breaking universality in quantum many-body dynamics, characterized not by a failure of regular thermalization, but rather by a failure of deep thermalization.
We investigate how quantum resource constraints affect deep thermalization, the emergence of universal local wavefunction distributions from partial measurements of a quantum many-body state. Quantum resources, such as non-stabilizerness (magic), coherence, asymmetry, imaginarity, and non-Gaussianity, are essential for quantum information processing, and constraints on their global abundance can reshape these emergent distributions. To address this question, we develop a unified framework for deep thermalization within general quantum resource theories (QRTs). Our central result is that QRTs fall into two classes: ``smoothly localizable'' (SL) QRTs, where the resource content of local post-measurement states changes continuously with the global resource density, set by the initial state and measurement basis, yielding continuously tunable wavefunction distributions; and ``threshold localizable'' (TL) QRTs, where the local resource content jumps discontinuously from minimal to near-maximal past a critical global resource threshold, producing a sharp transition between a resourceless, ``deep-ergodicity breaking'' distribution and a resourceful, maximally random one. We trace this SL-TL dichotomy to an information-theoretic mechanism, block sharpening: by viewing each QRT as coherence between blocks in Hilbert space, we show that the local resource content depends on the measurement's ability to collapse an initial superposition into a single resourceless block. Our theory is analytically tractable and quantitatively predicts the phase boundaries across all studied QRTs, which we validate with extensive numerical simulations. Finally, we highlight two consequences: a novel magic transition in zero-rate quantum error-correcting codes--previously believed to occur only at finite rates--and new implications for quantum resource certification protocols based on post-measurement state ensembles.
We uncover emergent universality arising in the equilibration dynamics of multimode continuous-variable systems. Specifically, we study the ensemble of pure states supported on a small subsystem of a few modes, generated by Gaussian measurements on the remaining modes of a globally pure bosonic Gaussian state. We find that beginning from highly entangled, complex global states, such as random Gaussian states and product squeezed states coupled via a deep array of linear optical elements, the induced ensemble attains a universal form, independent of the choice of measurement basis: it is composed of unsqueezed coherent states whose displacements are distributed normally and isotropically, with variance depending on only the particle-number density of the system. We further show that the emergence of such a universal form is consistent with a generalized maximum entropy principle, which endows the limiting ensemble, which we call the "Gaussian Scrooge distribution," with a special quantum information-theoretic property of having minimal accessible information. Our results represent a conceptual generalization of the recently introduced notion of "deep thermalization" in discrete-variable quantum many-body systems-a novel form of equilibration going beyond thermalization of local observables-to the realm of continuous-variable quantum systems. Moreover, it demonstrates how quantum information-theoretic perspectives can unveil new physical phenomena and principles in quantum dynamics and statistical mechanics.
Recent studies of "deep thermalization" have revealed universal physics in quantum many-body dynamics beyond equilibration towards Gibbs states: maximally random quantum state ensembles can emerge on local subsystems, generated by measurements on their complement. In this work, we further identify a new form of universality exhibited in the "finer fingerprints" of quantum dynamics for local subsystems, induced by global unitary time-evolution. Specifically, we consider the projected Kraus ensemble, an ensemble of Kraus operators obtained by unraveling the quantum channel on a small subsystem with respect to knowledge of the classical configurations of its complement. Our central result is a one-parameter random matrix Ansatz that captures the ensemble's emergent statistical behavior along particular spacetime scalings, valid for generic 1D circuit dynamics without conservation laws: the ensemble is described by the product of a complex Ginibre random matrix and an independent log-normal random real scalar. The former encodes scrambling within the subsystem, captured by rotational invariance of the Ginibre measure, whereas the latter encodes fluctuations in the Born probabilities, arising from locality of the underlying dynamics. Our Ansatz can be established in the special cases of dynamics generated by global Haar random unitaries and dual-unitary circuits, while we motivate it for generic circuits using arguments of spacetime duality and the multiplicative ergodic theorem on long products of spatial transfer matrices. Extensive numerical simulations for random and Floquet circuit models verify these predictions. This universality in Kraus operators also provides a microscopic mechanism for deep thermalization in generic 1D quantum circuit dynamics, and has implications for local quantum information recoverability involving classical side information tied to knowledge of the bath.