We study the time evolution of occupation numbers for interacting Fermi-particles in the situation when exact compound states are "chaotic". This situation is generic for highly excited many-particles states in heavy nuclei, complex atoms, quantum dots, spin systems and quantum computer models. Numerical data show perfect agreement with a simple theory for the onset of thermalization in close systems of interacting particles.
New method is developed for calculation of single-particle occupation numbers in finite Fermi systems of interacting particles. It is more accurate than the canonical distribution method and gives the Fermi-Dirac distribution in the limit of large number of particles. It is shown that statistical effects of the interaction are absorbed by an increase of the effective temperature. Criteria for quantum chaos and statistical equilibrium are considered. All results are confirmed by numerical experiments in the two-body random interaction model.
We study the matrix elements of local and nonlocal operators in the single-particle eigenstates of two paradigmatic quantum-chaotic quadratic Hamiltonians; the quadratic Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK2) model and the three-dimensional Anderson model below the localization transition. We show that they display eigenstate thermalization for normalized observables. Specifically, we show that the diagonal matrix elements exhibit vanishing eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations, and a variance proportional to the inverse Hilbert space dimension. We also demonstrate that the ratio between the variance of the…
Semiclassical scaling of eigenstate thermalization in single-particle chaotic systems
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems（马克斯·普朗克复杂系统物理研究所）；Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Institute for Advanced Studies（复旦张肇韦量子中心，上海高等研究院）；CAS Key Laboratory of Microscale Magnetic Resonance（中国科学院微观磁学共振重点实验室）
We consider a particle in the approximation of a harmonic oscillator, coupled linearly to a field modeling an environment. The field is described by an infinite set of harmonic oscillators, and the system (particle--field) is considered in a cavity at thermal equilibrium. We employ the notions of bare and dressed coordinates to study the time evolution of the occupation number. With dressed coordinates no renormalization procedure is required, leading directly to a finite result. In particular, for a large time, the occupation number of the particle becomes independent of its initial value. So…
We investigate the asymptotic state of time-periodic quantum systems with regular and chaotic Floquet states weakly coupled to a heat bath. The asymptotic occupation probabilities of these two types of states follow fundamentally different distributions. Among regular states the probability decreases from the state in the center of a regular island to the outermost state by orders of magnitude, while chaotic states have almost equal probabilities. We derive an analytical expression for the occupations of regular states of kicked systems, which depends on the winding numbers of the regular tori…
We present a detailed analysis of the connection between chaos and the onset of thermalization in the spin-boson Dicke model. This system has a well-defined classical limit with two degrees of freedom, and it presents both regular and chaotic regions. Our studies of the eigenstate expectation values and the distributions of the off-diagonal elements of the number of photons and the number of excited atoms validate the diagonal and off-diagonal eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in the chaotic region, thus ensuring thermalization. The validity of the ETH reflects the chaotic structure o…
Coined discrete-time quantum walks are studied using simple deterministic dynamical systems as coins whose classical limit can range from being integrable to chaotic. It is shown that a Loschmidt echo like fidelity plays a central role and when the coin is chaotic this is approximately the characteristic function of a classical random walker. Thus the classical binomial distribution arises as a limit of the quantum walk and the walker exhibits diffusive growth before eventually becoming ballistic. The coin-walker entanglement growth is shown to be logarithmic in time as in the case of many-bod…
We consider a particle in the harmonic approximation coupled linearly to an environment. modeled by an infinite set of harmonic oscillators. The system (particle--environment) is considered in a cavity at thermal equilibrium. We employ the recently introduced notion of renormalized coordinates to investigate the time evolution of the particle occupation number. For comparison we first present this study in bare coordinates. For a long ellapsed time, in both approaches, the occupation number of the particle becomes independent of its initial value. The value of ocupation number of the particle …
Dynamics of large complex systems, such as relaxation towards equilibrium in classical statistical mechanics, often obeys a master equation. The equation significantly simplifies the complexities but describes essential information of occupation probabilities. A related fundamental question is the thermalization, a coherent evolution of an isolated many-body quantum state into a state that seems to be in thermal equilibrium. It is valuable to find an effective equation describing this complex dynamics. Here, we experimentally investigate the question by observing sudden quench dynamics of quan…
The onset of thermalization in a closed finite system of randomly interacting bosons, at the level of a single eigenstate, is discussed. The main interest is in the emergence of the Bose-Einstein distribution of single-particle occupation numbers, establishing a global and local criterion for thermalization. We show how to define the temperature of a given eigenstate, provided that it has a chaotic structure in the basis defined by single-particle states. The analytical expression for the eigenstate temperature as a function of the inter-particle interaction and energy is complemented by numer…
Thermalization of isolated quantum systems has been studied intensively in recent years and significant progresses have been achieved. Here, we study thermalization of small quantum systems that interact with large chaotic environments under the consideration of Schrödinger evolution of composite systems, from the perspective of the zeroth law of thermodynamics. Namely, we consider a small quantum system that is brought into contact with a large environmental system; after they have relaxed, they are separated and their temperatures are studied. Our question is under what conditions the small …
We study the quantum dynamics of the kicked Dicke model(KDM) in terms of the Floquet operator and analyze the connection between the chaos and thermalization in this context. The Hamiltonian map is constructed by taking the classical limit of the Heisenberg equation of motion suitably to study the corresponding phase space dynamics which shows a crossover from regular to chaotic motion by tuning the kicking strength. The fixed point analysis and calculation of the Lyapunov exponent(LE) provides us a complete picture of the onset of chaos in phase space dynamics. We carry out the spectral analy…
We study the non-equiliribium dynamics of atom-molecule Bose gases in a double-well potential. In this system, the internal atom-molecule tunneling has significant influence on the dynamics. We investigate the periodicity of dynamics by studying the level statistics of the quantum system. We find that chaotic energy eigenstates arise from the competition between the interwell and the atom-molecule internal tunnelings. Furthermore, we show that the physical quantities relax to the microcanonical averages in the full-quantum dynamics when the system is chaotic. This thermalization is caused by t…
We address the question of the relevance of thermalization to the increase of correlations in the quench dynamics of an isolated system with a finite number of interacting bosons. Specifically, we study how, in the process of thermalization, the correlations between occupation numbers increase in time resulting in the emergence of the Bose-Einstein distribution. We show, both analytically and numerically, that before saturation the two-point correlation function increases quadratically in time. This time dependence is at variance with the exponential increase of the number of principal compone…
We introduce a novel method of quantum emulation of a classical reversible cellular automaton. By applying this method to a chaotic cellular automaton, the obtained quantum many-body system thermalizes while all the energy eigenstates and eigenvalues are solvable. These explicit solutions allow us to verify the validity of some scenarios of thermalization to this system. We find that two leading scenarios, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis scenario and the large effective dimension scenario, do not explain thermalization in this model.
We study thermalization in many-body quantum systems locally coupled to an external bath. It is shown that quantum chaotic systems do thermalize, that is, they exhibit relaxation to an invariant ergodic state which, in the bulk, is well approximated by the grand canonical state. Moreover, the resulting ergodic state in the bulk does not depend on the details of the baths. On the other hand, for integrable systems the invariant state does depend on the bath and is different from the grand canonical state.
We study how the proximity to an integrable point or to localization as one approaches the atomic limit, as well as the mixing of symmetries in the chaotic domain, may affect the onset of thermalization in finite one-dimensional systems. We consider systems of hard-core bosons at half-filling with nearest neighbor hopping and interaction, and next-nearest neighbor interaction. The latter breaks integrability and induces a ground-state superfluid to insulator transition. By full exact diagonalization, we study chaos indicators and few-body observables. We show that when different symmetry secto…
We show that the known bound on the growth rate of the out-of-time-order four-point correlator in chaotic many-body quantum systems follows directly from the general structure of operator matrix elements in systems that obey the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. This ties together two key paradigms of thermal behavior in isolated many-body quantum systems.
We introduce a semiclassical theory for strong localization that may arise in the context of many-body thermalization. As a minimal model for thermalization we consider a few-site Bose-Hubbard model consisting of two weakly interacting subsystems that can exchange particles. The occupation of a subsystem ($x$) satisfies in the classical treatment a Fokker-Planck equation with a diffusion coefficient $D(x)$. We demonstrate that it is possible to deduce from the classical description a quantum breaktime $t^*$, and hence the manifestations of a strong localization effect. For this purpose it is e…
We model an isolated quantum computer as a two-dimensional lattice of qubits (spin halves) with fluctuations in individual qubit energies and residual short-range inter-qubit couplings. In the limit when fluctuations and couplings are small compared to the one-qubit energy spacing, the spectrum has a band structure and we study the quantum computer core (central band) with the highest density of states. Above a critical inter-qubit coupling strength, quantum chaos sets in, leading to quantum ergodicity of eigenstates in an isolated quantum computer. The onset of chaos results in the interactio…
TU Dresden, Institute of Theoretical Physics and Center for Dynamics（德累斯顿工业大学理论物理研究所与动力学中心）；Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems（马克斯·普朗克复杂系统物理研究所）
We study dynamics of entanglement in the thermalization process of an isolated quantum many-body system. We propose a simple setup for measuring the propagation speed of entanglement entropy (EE) in numerical simulations and apply it to the integrable/non-integrable spin models in 1D - the transverse Ising (TI) model, the chaotic Ising (CI) model, and the extended chaotic Ising (ECI) model. We find that two distinct time-scales $t^\ast$ and $t_{\rm {diff}}$ arise in the dynamics of EE in the thermalization process: the former represents the time-scale for the saturation of EE and the latter ch…
We study the off-diagonal matrix elements of observables that break the translational symmetry of a spin-chain Hamiltonian, and as such connect energy eigenstates from different total quasimomentum sectors. We consider quantum-chaotic and interacting integrable points of the Hamiltonian, and focus on average energies at the center of the spectrum. In the quantum-chaotic model, we find that there is eigenstate thermalization; specifically, the matrix elements are Gaussian distributed with a variance that is a smooth function of $ω=E_α-E_β$ ({$E_α$} are the eigenenergies) and scales as $1/D$ ($D…
We demonstrate effective equilibration for unitary quantum dynamics under conditions of classical chaos. Focusing on the paradigmatic example of the Dicke model, we show how a constructive description of the thermalization process is facilitated by the Glauber $Q$ or Husimi function, for which the evolution equation turns out to be of Fokker-Planck type. The equation describes a competition of classical drift and quantum diffusion in contractive and expansive directions. By this mechanism the system follows a 'quantum smoothened' approach to equilibrium, which avoids the notorious singularitie…
A profound quest of statistical mechanics is the origin of irreversibility - the arrow of time. New stimulants have been provided, thanks to unprecedented degree of control reached in experiments with isolated quantum systems and rapid theoretical developments of manybody localization in disordered interacting systems. The proposal of (many-body) eigenstate thermalization (ET) for these systems reinforces the common belief that either interaction or extrinsic randomness is required for thermalization. Here, we unveil a quantum thermalization mechanism challenging this belief. We find that, pro…
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is a compelling conjecture which strives to explain the apparent thermal behavior of generic observables in closed quantum systems. Although we are far from a complete analytic understanding, quantum chaos is often seen as a strong indication that the ansatz holds true. In this paper, we address the thermalization of energy eigenstates in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, a maximally chaotic model of strongly-interacting Majorana fermions. We numerically investigate eigenstate thermalization for specific few-body operators in the original SYK model as well a…
We highlight a dynamical anomaly in which the rate of relaxation towards thermal equilibrium in a bi-partite quantum system violates the standard linear-response (Kubo) formulation, even when the underlying dynamics is highly chaotic. This anomaly originates from an $\hbar$-dependent sparsity of the underlying quantum network of transitions. Using a minimal bi-partite Bose-Hubbard model as an example, we find that the relaxation rate acquires an anomalous $\hbar$ dependence that reflects percolation-like dynamics in energy space.
In this talk, we discuss real-time thermalization dynamics of $\mathbf{Z}_2$ Lattice Gauge Theory in 2+1 spacetime dimensions. While classical thermalization is commonly associated with chaotic behavior, turbulence and universality, the manifestation of these phenomena in quantum mechanical systems is not clear. However, when viewed through the lens of Entanglement Structure, we find that quantum thermalization proceeds in characteristic stages and reveals phenomena remarkably similar to their classical counterparts: chaos, turbulence and universality.
The Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) implies a form for the matrix elements of local operators between eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, expected to be valid for chaotic systems. Another signal of chaos is a positive Lyapunov exponent, defined on the basis of Loschmidt echo or out-of-time-order correlators. For this exponent to be positive, correlations between matrix elements unrelated by symmetry, usually neglected, have to exist. The same is true for the peak of the dynamic heterogeneity length, relevant for systems with slow dynamics. These correlations, as well as those between el…
The Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) has played a major role in understanding thermodynamic phenomena in closed quantum systems. However, its connection to the timescale of thermalization for open system dynamics has remained elusive. This paper establishes a rigorous link between ETH and fast thermalization to the global Gibbs state. Specifically, we demonstrate fast thermalization for a system coupled weakly to a bath of quasi-free Fermions that we refresh periodically. To describe the joint evolution, we derive a finite-time version of Davies' generator with explicit error bounds …
We study the matrix elements of few-body observables, focusing on the off-diagonal ones, in the eigenstates of the two-dimensional transverse field Ising model. By resolving all symmetries, we relate the onset of quantum chaos to the structure of the matrix elements. In particular, we show that a general result of the theory of random matrices, namely, the value 2 of the ratio of variances (diagonal to off-diagonal) of the matrix elements of Hermitian operators, occurs in the quantum chaotic regime. Furthermore, we explore the behavior of the off-diagonal matrix elements of observables as a fu…
We study the emergence over time of a universal, uniform distribution of quantum states supported on a finite subsystem, induced by projectively measuring the rest of the system. Dubbed deep thermalization, this phenomenon represents a form of equilibration in quantum many-body systems stronger than regular thermalization, which only constrains the ensemble-averaged values of observables. While there exist quantum circuit models of dynamics in one dimension where this phenomenon can be shown to arise exactly, these are special in that deep thermalization occurs at precisely the same time as re…
In this work we study a scenario where dynamics is restricted to a single excitation manifold, for particular physical observables with support in the manifold, which we label a `correlated quench'. We ask how such dynamics may in general differ from predictions of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH). We show that if thermalization occurs, it will not fulfil other key predictions of the ETH; instead following differing generic behaviours. We show this by analysing long-time fluctuations, two-point correlation functions, and the out-of-time-ordered correlator; analytically detailing …
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 specially 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, like the energy and structure of the initial state, or the dimension of the Hilbert space. We also obtain analytica…
Local Thermalization of SU(2) Lattice Gauge Fields on Quantum Computers
National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；National Center for Theoretical Sciences（国家理论科学中心）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）；Universität Regensburg（雷根斯堡大学）
Recent works have established universal entanglement properties and demonstrated validity of single-particle eigenstate thermalization in quantum-chaotic quadratic Hamiltonians. However, a common property of all quantum-chaotic quadratic Hamiltonians studied in this context so far is the presence of random terms that act as a source of disorder. Here we introduce tight-binding billiards in two dimensions, which are described by non-interacting spinless fermions on a disorder-free square lattice subject to curved open (hard-wall) boundaries. We show that many properties of tight-binding billiar…
We study the dynamics of thermalization following a quantum quench using tensor-network methods. Contrary to the common belief that the rapid growth of entanglement and the resulting exponential growth of the bond dimension restricts simulations to short times, we demonstrate that the long time limit of local observables can be well captured using the time-dependent variational principle. This allows to extract transport coefficients such as the energy diffusion constant from simulations with rather small bond dimensions. We further study the characteristic of the chaotic wave that precedes th…
