English

How accurately can the microcanonical ensemble describe small isolated quantum systems?

Statistical Mechanics 2015-08-26 v2

Abstract

We numerically investigate quantum quenches of a nonintegrable hard-core Bose-Hubbard model to test the accuracy of the microcanonical ensemble in small isolated quantum systems. We show that, in a certain range of system size, the accuracy increases with the dimension of the Hilbert space DD as 1/D1/D. We ascribe this rapid improvement to the absence of correlations between many-body energy eigenstates as well as to the eigenstate thermalization. Outside of that range, the accuracy is found to scale as 1/D1/\sqrt{D} and improves algebraically with the system size.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1503.07974,
  title  = {How accurately can the microcanonical ensemble describe small isolated quantum systems?},
  author = {Tatsuhiko N. Ikeda and Masahito Ueda},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.07974},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

6 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:03:29.375Z