English

Testing whether all eigenstates obey the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis

Statistical Mechanics 2014-11-13 v2 Quantum Physics

Abstract

We ask whether the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) is valid in a strong sense: in the limit of an infinite system, {\it every} eigenstate is thermal. We examine expectation values of few-body operators in highly-excited many-body eigenstates and search for `outliers', the eigenstates that deviate the most from ETH. We use exact diagonalization of two one-dimensional nonintegrable models: a quantum Ising chain with transverse and longitudinal fields, and hard-core bosons at half-filling with nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor hopping and interaction. We show that even the most extreme outliers appear to obey ETH as the system size increases, and thus provide numerical evidences that support ETH in this strong sense. Finally, periodically driving the Ising Hamiltonian, we show that the eigenstates of the corresponding Floquet operator obey ETH even more closely. We attribute this better thermalization to removing the constraint of conservation of the total energy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1408.0535,
  title  = {Testing whether all eigenstates obey the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis},
  author = {Hyungwon Kim and Tatsuhiko N. Ikeda and David A. Huse},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.0535},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

9 pages, 6 figures. Updated references and clarified some arguments

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:19:28.197Z