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Physical review. E

Probing eigenstate thermalization in the weakly interacting Holstein polaron model

K. Prashant, A. Adhikari, C. Sudheesh

Published Jun 15, 2026• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

The origin of chaos in quantum systems remains a central challenge in many-body physics. Here, we use the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) as a tool to investigate the transition from integrability to chaos in the one-dimensional Holstein polaron model. By combining exact diagonalization with an analysis of eigenstate expectation values (EEVs) and the statistical properties of off-diagonal matrix elements, we provide a detailed characterization of thermalization indicators in this model. In the integrable regime, we observe distributions of EEVs and power-law decays of their outliers with system size, consistent with the breakdown of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH). Notably, in the noninteracting limit, standard indicators of quantum chaos, such as the mean level spacing, fail to capture the absence of integrability breaking. As integrability is broken, the off-diagonal matrix elements exhibit Gaussian statistics with variances matching random-matrix predictions, while EEV fluctuations vanish rapidly, signaling the onset of quantum chaos. Our results establish the AGP, with matrix element statistics, as a framework to probe the crossover from integrability to chaos in electron-phonon coupled systems.

DOI
10.1103/7qgp-g9kx

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The origin of chaos in quantum systems remains a central challenge in many-body physics. Here, we use the adiabatic gauge potential (AGP) as a tool to investigate the transition from integrability to chaos in the one-dimensional Holstein polaron model. By combining exact diagonalization with an analysis of eigenstate expectation values (EEVs) and the statistical properties of off-diagonal matrix elements, we provide a detailed characterization of thermalization indicators in this model. In the integrable regime, we observe distributions of EEVs and power-law decays of their outliers with system size, consistent with the breakdown of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH). Notably, in the noninteracting limit, standard indicators of quantum chaos, such as the mean level spacing, fail to capture the absence of integrability breaking. As integrability is broken, the off-diagonal matrix elements exhibit Gaussian statistics with variances matching random-matrix predictions, while EEV fluctuations vanish rapidly, signaling the onset of quantum chaos. Our results establish the AGP, with matrix element statistics, as a framework to probe the crossover from integrability to chaos in electron-phonon coupled systems.
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.
In the past decades, it was recognized that quantum chaos, which is essential for the emergence of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, manifests itself in the effective description of the eigenstates of chaotic Hamiltonians through random matrix ensembles and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis.Standard measures of chaos in quantum many-body systems are level statistics and the spectral form factor.In this work, we show that the norm of the adiabatic gauge potential, the generator of adiabatic deformations between eigenstates, serves as a much more sensitive measure of quantum chaos.We are able to detect transitions from integrable to chaotic behavior at perturbation strengths orders of magnitude smaller than those required for standard measures.Using this alternative probe in two generic classes of spin chains, we show that the chaotic threshold decreases exponentially with system size and that one can immediately detect integrability-breaking (chaotic) perturbations by analyzing infinitesimal perturbations even at the integrable point.In some cases, small integrability breaking is shown to lead to anomalously slow relaxation of the system, exponentially long in system size.
The Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis explains thermalization in isolated quantum systems through the statistical properties of observables in the energy eigenbasis. We investigate the crossover from integrability to chaos in the spin-1/21/21/2 XXZ chain, establishing a direct correspondence between the spectral correlations of the Hamiltonian and local observables expressed in the energy eigenbasis as a signature of ergodicity breaking. By introducing a local perturbation that drives the system from integrability to chaos, we track the standard ETH indicators and the eigenstate entanglement entropy. We introduce a submatrix-based framework for analyzing local observables in the energy eigenbasis. By extracting real-symmetric blocks along the diagonal of the local observables represented in eigenbasis, we show that these submatrices exhibit both the short-range and long-range spectral features of the Hamiltonian. Remarkably, this correspondence persists even in a partially ergodic regime, indicating that the emergence of chaos is already encoded locally within the observables' matrix structure and that small blocks are sufficient to capture the underlying spectral correlations.
Using the ergodicity principle for the expectation values of several types of observables, we investigate the thermalization process in isolated fermionic systems.These are described by the two-body random ensemble, which is a paradigmatic model to study quantum chaos and especially the dynamical transition from integrability to chaos.By means of exact diagonalizations we analyze the relevance of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis as well as the influence of other factors, such as the energy and structure of the initial state, or the dimension of the Hilbert space.We also obtain analytical expressions linking the degree of thermalization for a given observable with the so-called number of principal components for transition strengths originating at a given energy, with the dimensions of the whole Hilbert space and microcanonical energy shell, and with the correlations generated by the observable.As the strength of the residual interaction is increased, an order-to-chaos transition takes place, and we show that the onset of Wigner spectral fluctuations, which is the standard signature of chaos, is not sufficient to guarantee thermalization in finite systems.When all the signatures of chaos are fulfilled, including the quasicomplete delocalization of eigenfunctions, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is the mechanism responsible for the thermalization of certain types of observables, such as (linear combinations of) occupancies and strength function operators.Our results also suggest that fully chaotic systems will thermalize relative to most observables in the thermodynamic limit.
We use field-theoretic methods to explore the statistics of eigenfunctions of the Floquet operator for a large family of Floquet random quantum circuits. The correlation function of the quasienergy eigenstates is calculated and shown to exhibit random matrix circular unitary ensemble statistics, which is consistent with the analogue of Berry's conjecture for quantum circuits. This quantity determines all key metrics of quantum chaos, such as the spectral form factor and thermalizing time-dependence of the expectation value of an arbitrary observable. It also allows us to explicitly show that the matrix elements of local operators satisfy the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH); i.e., the variance of the off-diagonal matrix elements of such operators is exponentially small in the system size. These results represent a proof of ETH for the family of Floquet random quantum circuits at a physical level of rigor. An outstanding open question for this and most of other sigma-model calculations is a mathematically rigorous proof of the validity of the saddle-point approximation in the large-N limit.
Eigenstate thermalization has been numerically shown to occur for few-body observables in a wide range of nonintegrable models. For intensive sums of few-body observables, a weaker version of eigenstate thermalization known as weak eigenstate thermalization has been proved to occur in general. Here, we unveil a stricter weak eigenstate thermalization phenomenon that occurs in quadratic models exhibiting quantum chaos in the single-particle sector (quantum-chaotic quadratic models) and in integrable interacting models. In such models, we argue that few-body observables that have a properly defined system-size independent norm are guaranteed to exhibit at least a polynomially vanishing variance (over the entire many-body energy spectrum) of the diagonal matrix elements, a phenomenon we dub normal weak eigenstate thermalization. We prove that normal weak eigenstate thermalization is a consequence of single-particle eigenstate thermalization, i.e., it can be viewed as a manifestation of quantum chaos at the single-particle level. We report numerical evidence of normal weak eigenstate thermalization for quantum-chaotic quadratic models such as the three-dimensional Anderson model in the delocalized regime and the power-law random banded matrix model, as well as for the integrable interacting spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ XYZ and XXZ models.