We show that the vast majority of all pure states featuring a common expectation value of some generic observable at a given time will yield very similar expectation values of the same observable at any later time. This is meant to apply to Schroedinger type dynamics in high dimensional Hilbert spaces. As a consequence individual dynamics of expectation values are then typically well described by the ensemble average. Our approach is based on the Hilbert space average method. We support the analytical investigations with numerics obtained by exact diagonalization of the full time-dependent Schroedinger equation for some pertinent, abstract Hamiltonian model. Furthermore, we discuss the implications on the applicability of projection operator methods with respect to initial states, as well as on irreversibility in general.
Dynamical typicality refers to the property that two pure states, which initially exhibit (almost) the same expectation value for some given observable $A$, are very likely to exhibit also very similar expectation values when evolving in time according to the pertinent Schrödinger equation. We unify and generalize a variety of previous findings of this type for sufficiently high dimensional quantum mechanical model systems. Particular emphasize is put on the necessary and sufficient conditions, which the initial expectation value and the spectrum of $A$ have to fulfill.
We consider the dynamics of an arbitrary quantum system coupled to a large arbitrary and fully quantum mechanical environment through a random interaction. We establish analytically and check numerically the typicality of this dynamics, in other words the fact that the reduced density matrix of the system has a self-averaging property. This phenomenon, which lies in a generalized central limit theorem, justifies rigorously averaging procedures over certain classes of random interactions and can explain the absence of sensitivity to microscopic details of irreversible processes such as thermali…
Recent results suggest that the use of ensembles in Statistical Mechanics may not be necessary for isolated systems, since typically the states of the Hilbert space would have properties similar to the ones of the ensemble. Nevertheless, it is often argued that most of the states of the Hilbert space are non-physical and not good descriptions of realistic systems. Therefore, to better understand the actual power of typicality it is important to ask if it is also a property of a set of physically relevant states. Here we address this issue, studying if and how typicality emerges in the set of m…
We provide further analytical insights into the newly established noninteracting (free-fermion) Page curve, focusing on both the kinematic and dynamical aspects. First, we unveil the underlying canonical typicality and atypicality for random free-fermion states. The former appears for a small subsystem and is exponentially weaker than the well-known result in the interacting case. The latter explains why the free-fermion Page curve differs remarkably from the interacting one when the subsystem is macroscopically large, i.e., comparable with the entire system. Second, we find that the free-ferm…
Evidently, some relaxation dynamics, e.g. exponential decays, are much more common in nature than others. Recently there have been attempts to explain this observation on the basis of ``typicality of perturbations'' with respect to their impact on expectation value dynamics. These theories suggest that a majority of the very numerous, possible Hamiltonian perturbations entail more or less the same type of alteration of the decay dynamics. Thus, in this paper, we study how the approach towards equilibrium in closed quantum systems is altered due to weak perturbations. To this end, we perform nu…
The notion of typicality in statistical mechanics is essential to characterize a macroscopic system. An overwhelming majority of the pure state looks almost identical if we neglect macroscopic non-local correlations, suggesting that thermal equilibrium is the collection of the typical properties. Quantum entanglement, which characterizes a non-local correlation, also has a typical behavior in equilibrium systems. However, it remains elusive whether there is a typical behavior of entanglement in dynamical non-equilibrium systems. To investigate the typicality, we consider a situation where a sy…
We show that typicality holds for a class of nonequilibrium systems, i.e., nonequilibrium steady states (NESSs): almost all the pure states properly sampled from a certain Hilbert space well represent a NESS and characterize its intrinsic thermal nature. We clarify the relevant Hilbert space from which the pure states are to be sampled, and construct practically all the typical pure NESSs. The scattering approach leads us to the natural extension of the typicality for equilibrium systems. Each pure NESS correctly yields the expectation values of observables given by the standard ensemble appro…
Random Quantum States are presently of interest in the fields of quantum information theory and quantum chaos. Moreover, a detailed study of their properties can shed light on some foundational issues of the quantum statistical mechanics such as the emergence of well defined thermal properties from the pure quantum mechanical description of large many body systems. When dealing with an ensemble of pure quantum states, two questions naturally arise: what is the probability density function on the parameters which specify the state of the system in a given ensemble? And, does there exist a most …
Restricted typicality in non-equilibrium quantum many-body systems
Szkoła Doktorska Nauk Ścisłych i Przyrodniczych, Uniwersytet Jagielloński（雅盖隆大学自然科学博士学院）；Instytut Fizyki Teoretycznej, Wydział Fizyki, Astronomii i Informatyki Stosowanej, Uniwersytet Jagielloński（雅盖隆大学物理、天文学与应用信息学系理论物理研究所）；Barcelona Supercomputing Center（巴塞罗那超级计算中心）；Mark Kac Complex Systems Research Center, Jagiellonian University in Krakow（克拉科夫雅盖隆大学马克·卡克复杂系统研究中心）
We discuss the content and significance of John von Neumann's quantum ergodic theorem (QET) of 1929, a strong result arising from the mere mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. The QET is a precise formulation of what we call normal typicality, i.e., the statement that, for typical large systems, every initial wave function $ψ_0$ from an energy shell is "normal": it evolves in such a way that $|ψ_t> <ψ_t|$ is, for most $t$, macroscopically equivalent to the micro-canonical density matrix. The QET has been mostly forgotten after it was criticized as a dynamically vacuous statement in sev…
Our point of departure are the unitary dynamics of closed quantum systems as generated from the Schrödinger equation. We focus on a class of quantum models that typically exhibit roughly exponential relaxation of some observable within this framework. Furthermore, we focus on pure state evolutions. An entropy in accord with Jaynes principle is defined on the basis of the quantum expectation value of the above observable. It is demonstrated that the resulting deterministic entropy dynamics are in a sense in accord with a transient fluctuation theorem. Moreover, we demonstrate that the dynamics …
Loosely speaking, the concept of quantum typicality refers to the fact that a single pure state can imitate the full statistical ensemble. This fact has given rise to a rather simple but remarkably useful numerical approach to simulate the dynamics of quantum many-body systems, called dynamical quantum typicality (DQT). In this paper, we give a brief overview of selected applications of DQT, where particular emphasis is given to questions on transport and thermalization in low-dimensional lattice systems like chains or ladders of interacting spins or fermions. For these systems, we discuss tha…
We consider a macroscopic quantum system with unitarily evolving pure state $ψ_t\in \mathcal{H}$ and take it for granted that different macro states correspond to mutually orthogonal, high-dimensional subspaces $\mathcal{H}_ν$ (macro spaces) of $\mathcal{H}$. Let $P_ν$ denote the projection to $\mathcal{H}_ν$. We prove two facts about the evolution of the superposition weights $\|P_νψ_t\|^2$: First, given any $T>0$, for most initial states $ψ_0$ from any particular macro space $\mathcal{H}_μ$ (possibly far from thermal equilibrium), the curve $t\mapsto \|P_νψ_t\|^2$ is approximately the same (…
The response of a quantum system in a pure state to an external force is investigated by reconsidering the standard statistical approach to quantum dynamics on the light of the statistical description of equilibrium based on typicality. We prove that the response of the large majority of quantum pure states subjected to the same arbitrary external perturbation tends to be close to the statistical response as the dimension of the Hilbert space increases. This is what we can term dynamical typicality. The theoretical analysis is substantiated by numerical simulations of the response of a spin sy…
The typicality approach and the Hilbert space averaging method as its technical manifestation are important concepts of quantum statistical mechanics. Extensively used for expectation values we extend them in this paper to transition probabilities. In this context we also find that the transition probability of two random uniformly distributed states is connected to the spectral statistics of the considered operator. Furthermore, within our approach we are capable to consider distributions of matrix elements between states, that are not orthogonal. We will demonstrate our quite general result …
An analytical prediction is established of how an isolated many-body quantum system relaxes towards its thermal long-time limit under the action of a time-independent perturbation, but still remaining sufficiently close to a reference case whose temporal relaxation is known. This is achieved within the conceptual framework of a typicality approach by showing and exploiting that the time-dependent expectation values behave very similarly for most members of a suitably chosen ensemble of perturbations. The predictions are validated by comparison with various numerical and experimental results fr…
In this chapter we address the topic of quantum thermodynamics in the presence of additional observables beyond the energy of the system. In particular we discuss the special role that the generalized Gibbs ensemble plays in this theory, and derive this state from the perspectives of a micro-canonical ensemble, dynamical typicality and a resource-theory formulation. A notable obstacle occurs when some of the observables do not commute, and so it is impossible for the observables to simultaneously take on sharp microscopic values. We show how this can be circumvented, discuss information-theore…
Each scheme of state reconstruction comes down to parametrize the state of a quantum system by expectation values or probabilities directly measurable in an experiment. It is argued that the time evolution of these quantities provides an unambiguous description of the quantal dynamics. This is shown explicitly for a single spin s, using a quorum of expectation values which contains no redundant information. The quantum mechanical time evolution of the system is rephrased in terms of a closed set of linear first-order differential equations coupling (2s+1)^2 expectation values. This `realizatio…
We propose a method based on deep reinforcement learning that efficiently prepares a quantum many-body pure state in thermal or prethermal equilibrium. The main physical intuition underlying the method is that the information on the equilibrium states can be efficiently encoded/extracted by focusing on only a few local observables, relying on the typicality of equilibrium states. Instead of resorting to the expensive preparation protocol that adopts global features such as the quantum state fidelity, we show that the equilibrium states can be efficiently prepared only by learning the expectati…
A useful and universal formula for the expectation value of the radial operator in the presence of the Aharonov-Bohm flux and the Coulomb Field is established. We find that the expectation value $< r^λ>$ $(-\infty \leq λ\leq \infty)$ is greatly affected due to the non-local effect of the magnetic flux although the Aharonov-Bohm flux does not have any dynamical significance in classical mechanics. In particular, the quantum fluctuation increases in the presence of the magnetic flux due to the Aharonov-Bohm effect. In addition, the Virial theory in quantum mechanics is also constructed for the s…
A self-adjoint dynamical time operator is introduced in Dirac's relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics and shown to satisfy a commutation relation with the Hamiltonian analogous to that of the position and momentum operators. The ensuing time-energy uncertainty relation involves the uncertainty in the instant of time when the wave packet passes a particular spatial position and the energy uncertainty associated with the wave packet at the same time, as envisaged originally by Bohr. The instantaneous rate of change of the position expectation value with respect to the simultaneous expect…
Using a model Hamiltonian for a single-mode electromagnetic field interacting with a nonlinear medium, we show that quantum expectation values of subsystem observables can exhibit remarkably diverse ergodic properties even when the dynamics of the total system is regular. The time series of the mean photon number is studied over a range of values of the ratio of the strength $γ$ of the nonlinearity to that of the inter-mode coupling $g$. We obtain the power spectrum, estimate the embedding dimension of the reconstructed phase space and the maximal Liapunov exponent $λ_{\rm max}$, and find the …
A system composed of identical spins and described by a quantum mechanical pure state is analyzed within the statistical framework presented in Part I of this work. We explicitly derive the typical values of the entropy, of the energy, and of the equilibrium reduced density matrix of a subsystem for the two different statistics introduced in Part I. In order to analyze their consistency with thermodynamics, these quantities of interest are evaluated in the limit of large number of components of the isolated system. The main results can be summarized as follows: typical values of the entropy an…
The dynamical invariant, whose expectation value is constant, is generalized to open quantum system. The evolution equation of dynamical invariant (the dynamical invariant condition) is presented for Markovian dynamics. Different with the dynamical invariant for the closed quantum system, the evolution of the dynamical invariant for the open quantum system is no longer unitary, and the eigenvalues of it are time-dependent. Since any hermitian operator fulfilling dynamical invariant condition is a dynamical invariant, we propose a sort of special dynamical invariant (decoherence free dynamical …
Quantum dynamics on quasiperiodic geometries has recently gathered significant attention in ultra-cold atom experiments where non trivial localised phases have been observed. One such quasiperiodic model is the so called Fibonacci model. In this tight-binding model, non-interacting particles are subject to on-site energies generated by a Fibonacci sequence. This is known to induce critical states, with a continuously varying dynamical exponent, leading to anomalous transport. In this work, we investigate whether anomalous diffusion present in the non-interacting system survives in the presence…
Given a quantum many-body system and the expectation-value dynamics of some operator, we study how this reference dynamics is altered due to a perturbation of the system's Hamiltonian. Based on projection operator techniques, we unveil that if the perturbation exhibits a random-matrix structure in the eigenbasis of the unperturbed Hamiltonian, then this perturbation effectively leads to an exponential damping of the original dynamics. Employing a combination of dynamical quantum typicality and numerical linked cluster expansions, we demonstrate that our theoretical findings for random matrices…
The dynamics of the driven tight binding model for Wannier-Stark systems is formulated and solved using a dynamical algebra. This Lie algebraic approach is very convenient for evaluating matrix elements and expectation values. It is also shown that a dynamical invariant can be constructed. A classicalization of the tight binding model is discussed as well as some illustrating examples of Bloch oscillations and dynamical localization effects.
If the evaporation of a black hole formed from a pure state is unitary, the entanglement entropy of the Hawking radiation should follow the Page curve, increasing from zero until near the halfway point of the evaporation, and then decreasing back to zero. The general argument for the Page curve is based on the assumption that the quantum state of the black hole plus radiation during the evaporation process is typical. In this paper, we show that the Page curve can result from a simple dynamical input in the evolution of the black hole, based on a recently proposed signature of quantum chaos, w…
In quantum mechanics textbooks the momentum operator is defined in the Cartesian coordinates and rarely the form of the momentum operator in spherical polar coordinates is discussed. Consequently one always generalizes the Cartesian prescription to other coordinates and falls in a trap. In this work we introduce the difficulties one faces when the question of the momentum operator in spherical polar coordinate comes. We have tried to point out most of the elementary quantum mechanical results, related to the momentum operator, which has coordinate dependence. We explicitly calculate the moment…
Quenches in isolated quantum systems are currently a subject of intense study. Here, we consider quantum few-mode systems that are integrable in their classical mean-field limit and become dynamically unstable after a quench of a system parameter. Specifically, we study a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in a double-well potential and an antiferromagnetic spinor BEC constrained to a single spatial mode. We study the time dynamics after the quench within the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) and find that system relaxes to a steady state due to phase-space mixing. Using the action-angle formal…
Chaos in classical systems has been studied in plenty over many years. Although the search for chaos in quantum systems has been an area of prominent research over the last few decades, the detailed analysis of many inherently chaotic quantum systems based on expectation values of dynamical variables has not been reported in the literature. In this paper, we extend the study of dynamical behaviour using expectation values of variables to a $q$-deformed harmonic oscillator. The system is found to be periodic, quasi-periodic or chaotic depending on the values of the deformation parameter $q$ and…
We consider a realistic nonequilibrium protocol, where a quantum system in thermal equilibrium is suddenly subjected to an external force. Due to this force, the system is driven out of equilibrium and the expectation values of certain observables acquire a dependence on time. Eventually, upon switching off the external force, the system unitarily evolves under its own Hamiltonian and, as a consequence, the expectation values of observables equilibrate towards specific constant long-time values. Summarizing our main results, we show that, in systems which violate the eigenstate thermalization …
An extension of the conditional expectations (those under a given subalgebra of events and not the simple ones under a single event) from the classical to the quantum case is presented. In the classical case, the conditional expectations always exist; in the quantum case, however, they exist only if a certain weak compatibility criterion is satisfied. This compatibility criterion was introduced among others in a recent paper by the author. Then, state-independent conditional expectations and quantum Markov processes are studied. A classical Markov process is a probability measure, together wit…
The recent remarkable developments in quantum optics, mesoscopic and cold atom physics have given reality to wave functions. It is then interesting to explore the consequences of assuming ensembles over the wave functions simply related to the canonical density matrix. In this note we analyze a previously introduced distribution over wave functions which naturally arises considering the Schroedinger equation as an infinite dimensional dynamical system. In particular, we discuss the low temperature fluctuations of the quantum expectations of coordinates and momenta for a particle in a double we…
As a prototype model of topological quantum memory, two-dimensional toric code is genuinely immune to generic local static perturbations, but fragile at finite temperature and also after non-equilibrium time evolution at zero temperature. We show that dynamical localization induced by disorder makes the time evolution a local unitary transformation at all times, which keeps topological order robust after a quantum quench. We verify this conclusion by investigating the Wilson loop expectation value and topological entanglement entropy. Our results suggest that the two dimensional topological qu…
Non-commutative algebras and entanglement are two of the most important hallmarks of many-body quantum systems. Dynamical perturbation methods are the most widely used approaches for quantum many-body systems. While study of entanglement-based numerical methods are booming recently, the traditional dynamical perturbation methods have not benefited from study of quantum entanglement. In this work, we formulate an algebraic-dynamical theory (ADT) by combining the power of quantum algebras and dynamical methods in which quantum entanglement naturally emerges as the organizing principle. We start …
