Microscopic States and Averages

Keith S. Stowe

N. R. Cooper, Y. Yang, C. Weitenberg

Quantum gas microscopes offer unprecedented insights into quantum many-body states of cold atomic gases. Here we introduce concrete protocols for extending quantum gas microscopes to measure in phase space, by mapping momentum onto auxiliary degrees of freedom and using positive operator-valued measures. We distinguish between two distinct operational modes. In the Husimi-Q phase space microscope, position and momentum are jointly measured; in this mode the fundamental quantum noise is distributed between position and momentum. Conversely, the averaged-mode phase space microscope extracts the spatial dependence of averages of the momentum density (and its moments); these averages can be retrieved with arbitrary spatial resolution. We illustrate the utility of these techniques in diverse physical settings.

Steven M. Valone

Ensemble averages are an approximation technique for connecting macroscopic and microscopic properties of a system. For systems open with respect to exchange of particles with a bath, the microscopic states are those with integer numbers of particles. When a property of the open system is represented as an ensemble average over these microscopic states, self-consistency dictates several implications for the properties of both for open-system energy density functionals and the integer-state functionals describing the microscopic states. The first is that each integer-state energy density functional is a functional of the original type discovered by Levy. Another is that the dependence of the open-system functional on the ensemble density is linear whereas the dependence of the integer-state functional is decidedly nonlinear. Finally, the derivative discontinuity behavior with respect to particle number of some open-system density functionals appears to be connected to the long-range behavior of the effective external potentials of the integer-state functionals governing the interactions among subsystems in the ensemble.

Brian P. Anderson

Jason Pollack, Moshe Rozali A, James Sully +1 more

Naively, resolving the black hole information paradox requires microscopic details about quantum gravity. Recent work suggests that, instead, a unitary Page curve can be recovered by adding disorder-averaged replica instantons to the path integral, though their origin is unclear. In this Letter, we show how replica instantons and disorder averaging emerge naturally in an effective theory built from typical microscopic states. We relate replica instantons to a moment expansion of simple operators, and find a microcanonical description in terms of wormholes and Euclidean black holes.

Joan L. Robinson