We generalize Pages result on the entanglement entropy of random pure states to the many-body eigenstates of realistic disordered many-body systems subject to long range interactions. This extension leads to two principal conclusions: first, for increasing disorder the shells of constant energy supporting a systems eigenstates fill only a fraction of its full Fock space and are subject to intrinsic correlations absent in synthetic high-dimensional random lattice systems. Second, in all regimes preceding the many-body localization transition individual eigenstates are thermally distributed over these shells. These results, corroborated by comparison to exact diagonalization for an SYK model, are at variance with the concept of non-ergodic extended states in many-body systems discussed in the recent literature.
Download