No Arabic abstract
Complexity of dynamics is at the core of quantum many-body chaos and exhibits a hierarchical feature: higher-order complexity implies more chaotic dynamics. Conventional ergodicity in thermalization processes is a manifestation of the lowest order complexity, which is represented by the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) stating that individual energy eigenstates are thermal. Here, we propose a higher-order generalization of the ETH, named the $ k $-ETH ($ k=1,2,dots $), to quantify higher-order complexity of quantum many-body dynamics at the level of individual energy eigenstates, where the lowest order ETH (1-ETH) is the conventional ETH. As a non-trivial contribution of the higher-order ETH, we show that the $ k $-ETH with $ kgeq 2 $ implies a universal behavior of the $ k $th Renyi entanglement entropy of individual energy eigenstates. In particular, the Page correction of the entanglement entropy originates from the higher-order ETH, while as is well known, the volume law can be accounted for by the 1-ETH. We numerically verify that the 2-ETH approximately holds for a nonintegrable system, but does not hold in the integrable case. To further investigate the information-theoretic feature behind the $ k $-ETH, we introduce a concept named a partial unitary $ k $-design (PU $ k $-design), which is an approximation of the Haar random unitary up to the $ k $th moment, where partial means that only a limited number of observables are accessible. The $ k $-ETH is a special case of a PU $ k $-design for the ensemble of Hamiltonian dynamics with random-time sampling. In addition, we discuss the relationship between the higher-order ETH and information scrambling quantified by out-of-time-ordered correlators. Our framework provides a unified view on thermalization, entanglement entropy, and unitary $ k $-designs, leading to deeper characterization of higher-order quantum complexity.
We systematically investigate scrambling (or delocalizing) processes of quantum information encoded in quantum many-body systems by using numerical exact diagonalization. As a measure of scrambling, we adopt the tripartite mutual information (TMI) that becomes negative when quantum information is delocalized. We clarify that scrambling is an independent property of integrability of Hamiltonians; TMI can be negative or positive for both integrable and non-integrable systems. This implies that scrambling is a separate concept from conventional quantum chaos characterized by non-integrability. Furthermore, we calculate TMI in disordered systems such as many-body localized (MBL) systems and the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. We find that scrambling occurs but is slow in a MBL phase, while disorder in the SYK model does not make scrambling slower but makes it smoother.
Entanglement is usually quantified by von Neumann entropy, but its properties are much more complex than what can be expressed with a single number. We show that the three distinct dynamical phases known as thermalization, Anderson localization, and many-body localization are marked by different patterns of the spectrum of the reduced density matrix for a state evolved after a quantum quench. While the entanglement spectrum displays Poisson statistics for the case of Anderson localization, it displays universal Wigner-Dyson statistics for both the cases of many-body localization and thermalization, albeit the universal distribution is asymptotically reached within very different time scales in these two cases. We further show that the complexity of entanglement, revealed by the possibility of disentangling the state through a Metropolis-like algorithm, is signaled by whether the entanglement spectrum level spacing is Poisson or Wigner-Dyson distributed.
The quantum dynamics of interacting many-body systems has become a unique venue for the realization of novel states of matter. Here we unveil a new class of nonequilibrium states that are eigenstates of an emergent local Hamiltonian. The latter is explicitly time dependent and, even though it does not commute with the physical Hamiltonian, it behaves as a conserved quantity of the time-evolving system. We discuss two examples in which the emergent eigenstate solution can be applied for an extensive (in system size) time: transport in one-dimensional lattices with initial particle (or spin) imbalance, and sudden expansion of quantum gases in optical lattices. We focus on noninteracting spinless fermions, hard-core bosons, and the Heisenberg model. We show that current-carrying states can be ground states of emergent local Hamiltonians, and that they can exhibit a quasimomentum distribution function that is peaked at nonzero (and tunable) quasimomentum. We also show that time-evolving states can be highly-excited eigenstates of emergent local Hamiltonians, with an entanglement entropy that does not exhibit volume-law scaling.
We discuss eigenstate correlations for ergodic, spatially extended many-body quantum systems, in terms of the statistical properties of matrix elements of local observables. While the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is known to give an excellent description of these quantities, the butterfly effect implies structure beyond ETH. We determine the universal form of this structure at long distances and small eigenvalue separations for Floquet systems. We use numerical studies of a Floquet quantum circuit to illustrate both the accuracy of ETH and the existence of our predicted additional correlations.
Under unitary time evolution, expectation values of physically reasonable observables often evolve towards the predictions of equilibrium statistical mechanics. The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) states that this is also true already for individual energy eigenstates. Here we aim at elucidating the emergence of ETH for observables that can realistically be measured due to their high degeneracy, such as local, extensive or macroscopic observables. We bisect this problem into two parts, a condition on the relative overlaps and one on the relative phases between the eigenbases of the observable and Hamiltonian.