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 several papers in the 1950s. However, we point out that this criticism does not apply to the actual QET, a correct statement of which does not appear in these papers, but to a different (indeed weaker) statement. Furthermore, we formulate a stronger statement of normal typicality, based on the observation that the bound on the deviations from the average specified by von Neumann is unnecessarily coarse and a much tighter (and more relevant) bound actually follows from his proof.
We propose a generalization of the quantum entropy introduced by Wigner and von Neumann in 1929 [Zeitschrift für Physik 57, 30 (1929)]. Our generalization is applicable to both quantum pure states and mixed states. When the dimension $N$ of the Hilbert space is large, as a result of typicality, this generalized Wigner-von Neumann (GWvN) entropy becomes independent of choices of basis and is asymptotically equal to $\ln N$. The dynamic evolution of our entropy is also typical, reminiscent of quantum H theorem proved by von Neumann. For the microcanonical ensemble, the GWvN entropy is equivalent…
For a quantum system in a macroscopically large volume $V$, prepared in a pure state and subject to maximally noisy or ergodic unitary dynamics, the reduced density matrix of any sub-system $v\ll V$ is almost surely totally mixed. We show that the fluctuations around this limiting value, evaluated according to the invariant measure of these unitary flows, are captured by the Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE) of random matrix theory. An extension of this statement, applicable when the unitary transformations conserve the energy but are maximally noisy or ergodic on any energy shell, allows to dec…
We study the properties of mixed states obtained from eigenstates of many-body lattice Hamiltonians after tracing out part of the lattice. Two scenarios emerge for generic systems: (i) the diagonal entropy becomes equivalent to the thermodynamic entropy when a few sites are traced out (weak typicality); and (ii) the von Neumann (entanglement) entropy becomes equivalent to the thermodynamic entropy when a large fraction of the lattice is traced out (strong typicality). Remarkably, the results for few-body observables obtained with the reduced, diagonal, and canonical density matrices are very s…
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…
We examine quantum normal typicality and ergodicity properties for quantum systems whose dynamics are generated by Hamiltonians which have residual degeneracy in their spectrum and resonance in their energy gaps. Such systems can be considered atypical in the sense that degeneracy, which is usually a sign of symmetry, is naturally broken in typical systems due to stochastic perturbations. In particular, we prove a version of von Neumann's quantum ergodic theorem, where a modified condition needs to hold in order to have normal typicality and ergodicity. As a result, we show that degeneracy of …
The renewed interest in the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics in recent years has led us to study John von Neumann's 1929 article on the quantum ergodic theorem. We have found this almost forgotten article, which until now has been available only in German, to be a treasure chest, and to be much misunderstood. In it, von Neumann studied the long-time behavior of macroscopic quantum systems. While one of the two theorems announced in his title, the one he calls the "quantum H-theorem", is actually a much weaker statement than Boltzmann's classical H-theorem, the other theorem, which …
We provide a summary of both seminal and recent results on typical entanglement. By typical values of entanglement, we refer here to values of entanglement quantifiers that (given a reasonable measure on the manifold of states) appear with arbitrarily high probability for quantum systems of sufficiently high dimensionality. We work within the Haar measure framework for discrete quantum variables, where we report on results concerning the average von Neumann and linear entropies as well as arguments implying the typicality of such values in the asymptotic limit. We then proceed to discuss the g…
We present a simplified proof of the von Neumann's Quantum Ergodic Theorem. This important result was initially published in german by J. von Neumann in 1929. We are interested here in the time evolution $ψ_t$, $t\geq 0$, (for large times) under the Schrodinger equation associated to a given fixed Hamiltonian $H : \mathcal{H} \to \mathcal{H}$ and a general initial condition $ψ_0$. The dimension of the Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$ is finite.
One of the outstanding problems in non-equilibrium physics is to precisely understand when and how physically relevant observables in many-body systems equilibrate under unitary time evolution. General equilibration results show that equilibration is generic provided that the initial state has overlap with sufficiently many energy levels. But results not referring to typicality which show that natural initial states actually fulfill this condition are lacking. In this work, we present stringent results for equilibration for systems in which Renyi entanglement entropies in energy eigenstates wi…
An introduction to monitored quantum systems and quantum trajectories: spectrum, typicality, and phases
RIKEN Hakubi Research Team, RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute (PRI), RIKEN（RIKEN 博慧研究团队，RIKEN 先锋研究所）；RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences(iTHEMS), RIKEN（RIKEN 跨学科理论与数学科学中心(iTHEMS)）；Department of Applied Physics, University of Tokyo（东京大学应用物理系）
We extend the data compression theorem to the case of ergodic quantum information sources. Moreover, we provide an asymptotically optimal compression scheme which is based on the concept of high probability subspaces. The rate of this compression scheme is equal to the von Neumann entropy rate.
We prove that the average smooth Renyi entropy rate will approach the entropy rate of a stationary, ergodic information source, which is equal to the Shannon entropy rate for a classical information source and the von Neumann entropy rate for a quantum information source.
For a real number $r>0$, let $F(r)$ be the family of all stationary ergodic quantum sources with von Neumann entropy rates less than $r$. We prove that, for any $r>0$, there exists a blind, source-independent block compression scheme which compresses every source from $F(r)$ to $r n$ qubits per input block length $n$ with arbitrarily high fidelity for all large $n$. As our second result,we show that the stationarity and the ergodicity of a quantum source $\{ρ_m \}_{m=1}^{\infty}$ are preserved by any trace-preserving completely positive linear map of the tensor product form ${\cal E}^{\otimes …
We formulate and prove a quantum Shannon-McMillan theorem. The theorem demonstrates the significance of the von Neumann entropy for translation invariant ergodic quantum spin systems on n-dimensional lattices: the entropy gives the logarithm of the essential number of eigenvectors of the system on large boxes. The one-dimensional case covers quantum information sources and is basic for coding theorems.
A modification and generalisation of von Plato's fix of the frequency theory of probability is presented. It is thermodynamic in nature. Von Plato already fixed the logical circle in the frequency theory, we generalise his results to not necessarily ergodic systems of classical and quantum mechanics. This turns out to be precisely what is needed for the problem of Quantum Measurement and the problem of induction.
The generic behavior of quantum systems has long been of theoretical and practical interest. Any quantum process is represented by a sequence of quantum channels. We consider general ergodic sequences of stochastic channels with arbitrary correlations and non-negligible decoherence. Ergodicity includes and vastly generalizes random independence. We obtain a theorem which shows that the composition of such a sequence of channels converges exponentially fast to a replacement (rank-one) channel. Using this theorem, we derive the limiting behavior of translation-invariant channels and stochastical…
