English

Eigenstate Correlations, Thermalization and the Butterfly Effect

Statistical Mechanics 2019-06-11 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons High Energy Physics - Theory Quantum Physics

Abstract

We discuss eigenstate correlations for ergodic, spatially extended many-body quantum systems, in terms of the statistical properties of matrix elements of local observables. While the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is known to give an excellent description of these quantities, the butterfly effect implies structure beyond ETH. We determine the universal form of this structure at long distances and small eigenvalue separations for Floquet systems. We use numerical studies of a Floquet quantum circuit to illustrate both the accuracy of ETH and the existence of our predicted additional correlations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.11014,
  title  = {Eigenstate Correlations, Thermalization and the Butterfly Effect},
  author = {Amos Chan and Andrea De Luca and J. T. Chalker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.11014},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures. To appear in PRL

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:52:54.219Z