No Arabic abstract
Since the first suggestion of the Jarzynski equality many derivations of this equality have been presented in both, the classical and the quantum context. While the approaches and settings greatly differ from one to another, they all appear to rely on the initial state being a thermal Gibbs state. Here, we present an investigation of work distributions in driven isolated quantum systems, starting off from pure states that are close to energy eigenstates of the initial Hamiltonian. We find that, for the nonintegrable system in quest, the Jarzynski equality is fulfilled to good accuracy.
We investigate a weak version of subsystem eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) for a two-dimensional large central charge conformal field theory by comparing the local equivalence of high energy state and thermal state of canonical ensemble. We evaluate the single-interval Renyi entropy and entanglement entropy for a heavy primary state in short interval expansion. We verify the results of Renyi entropy by two different replica methods. We find nontrivial results at the eighth order of short interval expansion, which include an infinite number of higher order terms in the large central charge expansion. We then evaluate the relative entropy of the reduced density matrices to measure the difference between the heavy primary state and thermal state of canonical ensemble, and find that the aforementioned nontrivial eighth order results make the relative entropy unsuppressed in the large central charge limit. By using Pinskers and Fannes-Audenaert inequalities, we can exploit the results of relative entropy to yield the lower and upper bounds on trace distance of the excited-state and thermal-state reduced density matrices. Our results are consistent with subsystem weak ETH, which requires the above trace distance is of power-law suppression by the large central charge. However, we are unable to pin down the exponent of power-law suppression. As a byproduct we also calculate the relative entropy to measure the difference between the reduced density matrices of two different heavy primary states.
We use exact diagonalization to study the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in the quantum dimer model on the square and triangular lattices. Due to the nonergodicity of the local plaquette-flip dynamics, the Hilbert space, which consists of highly constrained close-packed dimer configurations, splits into sectors characterized by topological invariants. We show that this has important consequences for ETH: We find that ETH is clearly satisfied only when each topological sector is treated separately, and only for moderate ratios of the potential and kinetic terms in the Hamiltonian. By contrast, when the spectrum is treated as a whole, ETH breaks down on the square lattice, and apparently also on the triangular lattice. These results demonstrate that quantum dimer models have interesting thermalization dynamics.
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is a successful theory that provides sufficient criteria for ergodicity in quantum many-body systems. Most studies were carried out for Hamiltonians relevant for ultracold quantum gases and single-component systems of spins, fermions, or bosons. The paradigmatic example for thermalization in solid-state physics are phonons serving as a bath for electrons. This situation is often viewed from an open-quantum system perspective. Here, we ask whether a minimal microscopic model for electron-phonon coupling is quantum chaotic and whether it obeys ETH, if viewed as a closed quantum system. Using exact diagonalization, we address this question in the framework of the Holstein polaron model. Even though the model describes only a single itinerant electron, whose coupling to dispersionless phonons is the only integrability-breaking term, we find that the spectral statistics and the structure of Hamiltonian eigenstates exhibit essential properties of the corresponding random-matrix ensemble. Moreover, we verify the ETH ansatz both for diagonal and offdiagonal matrix elements of typical phonon and electron observables, and show that the ratio of their variances equals the value predicted from random-matrix theory.
A profound quest of statistical mechanics is the origin of irreversibility - the arrow of time. New stimulants have been provided, thanks to unprecedented degree of control reached in experiments with isolated quantum systems and rapid theoretical developments of manybody localization in disordered interacting systems. The proposal of (many-body) eigenstate thermalization (ET) for these systems reinforces the common belief that either interaction or extrinsic randomness is required for thermalization. Here, we unveil a quantum thermalization mechanism challenging this belief. We find that, provided one-body quantum chaos is present, as a pure many-body state evolves the arrow of time can emerge, even without interaction or randomness. In times much larger than the Ehrenfest time that signals the breakdown of quantum-classical correspondence, quantum chaotic motion leads to thermal [Fermi-Dirac (FD) or Bose-Einstein (BE)] distributions and thermodynamics in individual eigenstates. Our findings lay dynamical foundation of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics of isolated quantum systems.
An open quantum system, whose time evolution is governed by a master equation, can be driven into a given pure quantum state by an appropriate design of the system-reservoir coupling. This points out a route towards preparing many body states and non-equilibrium quantum phases by quantum reservoir engineering. Here we discuss in detail the example of a emph{driven dissipative Bose Einstein Condensate} of bosons and of paired fermions, where atoms in an optical lattice are coupled to a bath of Bogoliubov excitations via the atomic current representing emph{local dissipation}. In the absence of interactions the lattice gas is driven into a pure state with long range order. Weak interactions lead to a weakly mixed state, which in 3D can be understood as a depletion of the condensate, and in 1D and 2D exhibits properties reminiscent of a Luttinger liquid or a Kosterlitz-Thouless critical phase at finite temperature, with the role of the ``finite temperature played by the interactions.