English

Convergence of eigenstate expectation values with system size

Mathematical Physics 2023-07-04 v2 Statistical Mechanics math.MP Quantum Physics

Abstract

Understanding the asymptotic behavior of physical quantities in the thermodynamic limit is a fundamental problem in statistical mechanics. In this paper, we study how fast the eigenstate expectation values of a local operator converge to a smooth function of energy density as the system size diverges. In translation-invariant quantum lattice systems in any spatial dimension, we prove that for all but a measure zero set of local operators, the deviations of finite-size eigenstate expectation values from the aforementioned smooth function are lower bounded by 1/O(N)1/O(N), where NN is the system size. The lower bound holds regardless of the integrability or chaoticity of the model, and is saturated in systems satisfying the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.05095,
  title  = {Convergence of eigenstate expectation values with system size},
  author = {Yichen Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.05095},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

v2: published version. 42-min video presentation: https://youtu.be/pjSbymXZBYM

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:27:27.964Z