The Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) explains how isolated quantum many-body systems thermalize by proposing that each energy eigenstate is already thermal. The hypothesis is believed to be essential to the understanding of quantum chaos and implies various important thermodynamic relations. While by now there are many numerical validations of the ETH, only few analytical arguments supporting the ETH have been found (M. Rigol et al., Nature 452, 2008). One of them is based on a semiclassical limit (M. Srednicki, Phys. Rev. E 50, 1994). Another important reasoning was given by Deutsch, who showed how a small interaction, which is modeled by a random matrix, leads to ETH (J.M. Deutsch, Phys. Rev. A 43, 1991). This thesis aims to find justification for the assumptions made by Deutsch from a microscopic point of view. The idea is to analyze whether a generic quantum system can be brought to a form that satisfies Deutsch's ansatz. The method is to use flow equations to define unitary transformations to map the initial Hamiltonian to an effective one, which can be compared to a random matrix. The test system is a one-dimensional hardcore boson model, which is set up using exact diagonalization and numerous symmetries. We analyze the statistical properties of the numerically obtained Hamiltonian matrices and test for normality and compare them to a random transformation. In a second step we verify that the continuous unitary transformations do not destroy the structure of typical few-body observables by studying the scaling of the inverse participation ratio. The obtained results support our hypothesis that it is possible to extend Deutsch's argument to generic microscopic many-body Hamiltonians.
The Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) explains how isolated quantum many-body systems thermalize by proposing that each energy eigenstate is already thermal. The hypothesis is believed to be essential to the understanding of quantum chaos and implies various important thermodynamic relations. While by now there are many numerical validations of the ETH, only few analytical arguments supporting the ETH have been found (M. Rigol et al., Nature 452, 2008). One of them is based on a semiclassical limit (M. Srednicki, Phys. Rev. E 50, 1994). Another important reasoning was given by Deutsch, who showed how a small interaction, which is modeled by a random matrix, leads to ETH (J.M. Deutsch, Phys. Rev. A 43, 1991). This thesis aims to find justification for the assumptions made by Deutsch from a microscopic point of view. The idea is to analyze whether a generic quantum system can be brought to a form that satisfies Deutsch's ansatz. The method is to use flow equations to define unitary transformations to map the initial Hamiltonian to an effective one, which can be compared to a random matrix. The test system is a one-dimensional hardcore boson model, which is set up using exact diagonalization and numerous symmetries. We analyze the statistical properties of the numerically obtained Hamiltonian matrices and test for normality and compare them to a random transformation. In a second step we verify that the continuous unitary transformations do not destroy the structure of typical few-body observables by studying the scaling of the inverse participation ratio. The obtained results support our hypothesis that it is possible to extend Deutsch's argument to generic microscopic many-body Hamiltonians.
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), which asserts that every eigenstate of a many-body quantum system is indistinguishable from a thermal ensemble, plays a pivotal role in understanding thermalization of isolated quantum systems. Yet, no evidence has been obtained as to whether the ETH holds for all few-body operators in a chaotic system; such few-body operators include key quantities in statistical mechanics, such as the total magnetization, the momentum distributions, and their low-order thermal and quantum fluctuations. Here, we formulate a conjecture that for a generic nonintegrable system the ETH holds simultaneously for all m-body operators with m<α∗N in the thermodynamic limit for some nonzero constant α∗>0. We first show the existence of such nontrivial constants for idealized (pseudo) random-matrix descriptions of many-body eigenstates. We then verify the conjecture for generic spin, Bose, and Fermi systems with local and few-body interactions by large-scale numerical calculations. Our results imply that generic systems satisfy the ETH simultaneously for all few-body operators, including their thermal and quantum fluctuations.
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is a successful theory that provides sufficient criteria for ergodicity in quantum many-body systems. Most studies were carried out for Hamiltonians relevant for ultracold quantum gases and single-component systems of spins, fermions, or bosons. The paradigmatic example for thermalization in solid-state physics are phonons serving as a bath for electrons. This situation is often viewed from an open-quantum-system perspective. Here, we ask whether a minimal microscopic model for electron-phonon coupling is quantum chaotic and whether it obeys ETH, if viewed as a closed quantum system. Using exact diagonalization, we address this question in the framework of the Holstein polaron model. Even though the model describes only a single itinerant electron, whose coupling to dispersionless phonons is the only integrability-breaking term, we find that the spectral statistics and the structure of Hamiltonian eigenstates exhibit essential properties of the corresponding random-matrix ensemble. Moreover, we verify the ETH ansatz both for diagonal and off-diagonal matrix elements of typical phonon and electron observables, and show that the ratio of their variances equals the value predicted from random-matrix theory.
If we prepare an isolated, interacting quantum system in an eigenstate and perturb a local observable at an initial time, its expectation value will relax towards a thermal expectation value, even though the time evolution of the system is deterministic. The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) of Deutsch and Srednicki suggests that this is possible because each eigenstate of the full quantum system acts as a thermal bath to its subsystems, such that the reduced density matrices of the subsystems resemble thermal density matrices. Here, we use the observation that the eigenvalue distribution of interacting quantum systems is a Gaussian under very general circumstances, and Dyson Brownian motion random matrix theory, to derive the ETH and thereby elevate it from hypothesis to theory. Our analysis provides a derivation of statistical mechanics which neither requires the concepts of ergodicity or typicality, nor that of entropy. Thermodynamic equilibrium follows solely from the applicability of quantum mechanics to large systems and the absence of integrability.
This review gives a pedagogical introduction to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), its basis, and its implications to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. In the first part, ETH is introduced as a natural extension of ideas from quantum chaos and random matrix theory (RMT). To this end, we present a brief overview of classical and quantum chaos, as well as RMT and some of its most important predictions. The latter include the statistics of energy levels, eigenstate components, and matrix elements of observables. Building on these, we introduce the ETH and show that it allows one to describe thermalization in isolated chaotic systems without invoking the notion of an external bath. We examine numerical evidence of eigenstate thermalization from studies of many-body lattice systems. We also introduce the concept of a quench as a means of taking isolated systems out of equilibrium, and discuss results of numerical experiments on quantum quenches. The second part of the review explores the implications of quantum chaos and ETH to thermodynamics. Basic thermodynamic relations are derived, including the second law of thermodynamics, the fundamental thermodynamic relation, fluctuation theorems, the fluctuation–dissipation relation, and the Einstein and Onsager relations. In particular, it is shown that quantum chaos allows one to prove these relations for individual Hamiltonian eigenstates and thus extend them to arbitrary stationary statistical ensembles. In some cases, it is possible to extend their regimes of applicability beyond the standard thermal equilibrium domain. We then show how one can use these relations to obtain nontrivial universal energy distributions in continuously driven systems. At the end of the review, we briefly discuss the relaxation dynamics and description after relaxation of integrable quantum systems, for which ETH is violated. We present results from numerical experiments and analytical studies of quantum quenches at integrability. We introduce the concept of the generalized Gibbs ensemble and discuss its connection with ideas of prethermalization in weakly interacting systems.
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) provides a powerful framework for understanding thermalization in isolated quantum many-body systems, yet a complete and conceptually transparent derivation has remained elusive. In this work, we derive the structure of ETH from a minimal dynamical principle, which we term the eigenstate typicality principle (ETP), together with general kinematic ingredients arising from entropy maximization, Hilbert-space geometry, and locality. ETP asserts that in quantum-chaotic systems, energy eigenstates are statistically indistinguishable, with respect to local measurements, from states drawn from the Haar measure on a narrow microcanonical shell. Within this framework, diagonal ETH arises from concentration of measure, provided that eigenstate typicality holds. The structure of off-diagonal matrix elements is then fixed by entropic scaling and the finite-time dynamical correlations of local observables, with ETP serving as the dynamical bridge to energy eigenstates, without invoking random-matrix assumptions. Our results establish ETH as a consequence of entropy, Hilbert-space geometry, and chaos-induced eigenstate typicality, and clarify its regime of validity across generic quantum-chaotic many-body systems, thereby deepening our understanding of quantum thermalization and the emergence of statistical mechanics from unitary many-body dynamics.
We derive the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) from a random matrix Hamiltonian by extending the model introduced by Deutsch (1991 Phys. Rev. A 43 2046). We approximate the coupling between a subsystem and a many-body environment by means of a random Gaussian matrix. We show that a common assumption in the analysis of quantum chaotic systems, namely the treatment of eigenstates as independent random vectors, leads to inconsistent results. However, a consistent approach to the ETH can be developed by introducing an interaction between random wave-functions that arises as a result of the orthonormality condition. This approach leads to a consistent form for off-diagonal matrix elements of observables. From there we obtain the scaling of time-averaged fluctuations of generic observables with system size for which we calculate an analytic form in terms of the inverse participation ratio. The analytic results are compared to exact diagonalizations of a quantum spin chain for different physical observables in multiple parameter regimes.