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Subsystem Thermalization Hypothesis in Quantum Spin Chains with Conserved Charges

Quantum Physics 2026-02-05 v2 Statistical Mechanics Strongly Correlated Electrons High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We consider the thermalization hypothesis of pure states in quantum Ising chain with Z2Z_2 symmetry, XXZ chain with U(1)U(1) symmetry, and XXX chain with SU(2)SU(2) symmetries. Two kinds of pure states are considered: the energy eigenstates and the typical states evolved unitarily from the random product states for a long enough period. We further group the typical states by their expectation values of the conserved charges and consider the fine-grained thermalization hypothesis. We compare the locally (subsystem) reduced states of typical states/eigenstates with the ones of the corresponding thermal ensemble states. Besides the usual thermal ensembles such as the (micro-)canonical ensemble without conserved charges and the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) with all conserved charges included, we also consider the so-called partial-GGEs (p-GGEs), which include only part of the conserved charges in the thermal ensemble. Moreover, in the framework of p-GGE, the Hamiltonian and other conserved charges are on an equal footing. The introduction of p-GGEs extends quantum thermalization to a more general scope. The validity of the subsystem thermalization hypothesis can be quantified by the smallness of the relative entropy of the reduced states obtained from the GGE/p-GGE and the typical states/eigenstates. We examine the validity of the thermalization hypothesis by numerically studying the relative entropy demographics. We show that the thermalization hypothesis holds generically for the small enough subsystems for various p-GGEs. Thus, our framework extends the universality of quantum thermalization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.09905,
  title  = {Subsystem Thermalization Hypothesis in Quantum Spin Chains with Conserved Charges},
  author = {Feng-Li Lin and Jhh-Jing Hong and Ching-Yu Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.09905},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:33:31.422Z