English

On thermality of CFT eigenstates

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-08-30 v2 Statistical Mechanics Quantum Physics

Abstract

The Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) provides a way to understand how an isolated quantum mechanical system can be approximated by a thermal density matrix. We find a class of operators in (1+1)-dd conformal field theories, consisting of quasi-primaries of the identity module, which satisfy the hypothesis only at the leading order in large central charge. In the context of subsystem ETH, this plays a role in the deviation of the reduced density matrices, corresponding to a finite energy density eigenstate from its hypothesized thermal approximation. The universal deviation in terms of the square of the trace-square distance goes as the 8th power of the subsystem fraction and is suppressed by powers of inverse central charge (cc). Furthermore, the non-universal deviations from subsystem ETH are found to be proportional to the heavy-light-heavy structure constants which are typically exponentially suppressed in h/c\sqrt{h/c}, where hh is the conformal scaling dimension of the finite energy density state. We also examine the effects of the leading finite size corrections.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.03001,
  title  = {On thermality of CFT eigenstates},
  author = {Pallab Basu and Diptarka Das and Shouvik Datta and Sridip Pal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.03001},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

25 pages, 2 figures; published version with a few references added

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:40:35.925Z