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Strong Eigenstate Thermalization from Mean-Ergodic Non-chaotic Dynamics

Statistical Mechanics 2026-05-26 v1 Quantum Physics

Abstract

We report an example of a many-body system, derived from the double kicked top (DKT), with non-chaotic yet mean-ergodic dynamics that displays \textit{strong} eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in the quantum regime. The analysis addresses a key open question: whether \textit{strong} ETH is a quantum analog of ergodicity (or mean-ergodicity). Despite non-chaotic dynamics, the fluctuations of the diagonal matrix elements of an observable scale as D1/2D^{-1/2}, where DD denotes the Hilbert space dimension. Furthermore, the off-diagonal matrix elements show Gaussian statistics together with a smooth function fO(Eˉ,ω)f_O(\bar{E}, \omega) that becomes nearly uniform in the large-kθk_\theta domain. Our findings show that even mean-ergodic and non-chaotic systems can exhibit \textit{strong} ETH.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.24510,
  title  = {Strong Eigenstate Thermalization from Mean-Ergodic Non-chaotic Dynamics},
  author = {Avadhut V. Purohit and Harshit Sharma and Udaysinh T. Bhosale},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.24510},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

5 pages (two-column) + 5 pages (one-column) + 12 figures. Comments are welcome