English

How to Build the Thermofield Double State

High Energy Physics - Theory 2019-02-20 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

Given two copies of any quantum mechanical system, one may want to prepare them in the thermofield double state for the purpose of studying thermal physics or black holes. However, the thermofield double is a unique entangled pure state and may be difficult to prepare. We propose a local interacting Hamiltonian for the combined system whose ground state is approximately the thermofield double. The energy gap for this Hamiltonian is of order the temperature. Our construction works for any quantum system satisfying the Eigenvalue Thermalization Hypothesis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.11528,
  title  = {How to Build the Thermofield Double State},
  author = {William Cottrell and Ben Freivogel and Diego M. Hofman and Sagar F. Lokhande},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.11528},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

are welcome. 47 pages, 8 figures. v2: Improved discussion of uniqueness and CFT primaries

R2 v1 2026-06-23T06:23:27.100Z