2016/07/01 by Anushya Chandran, A. Chandran, Marc Daniel Schulz +2 · 44 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Anyon #Eigenvalues and eigenvectors #Hilbert space #Mathematical physics #Observable #Physics #Quantum #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #Theoretical physics #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological quantum computer #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.str-el #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.94.235122
published in Physical review. B./Physical review. B 94(23) (American Physical Society) · 16 pages, 15 figures
arxiv created 2016/07/01 · openalex created_date 2016/07/22 · openalex publication_date 2016/12/08 · arxiv updated 2016/12/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Many phases of matter, including superconductors, fractional quantum Hall fluids, and spin liquids, are described by gauge theories with constrained Hilbert spaces. However, thermalization and the applicability of quantum statistical mechanics has primarily been studied in unconstrained Hilbert spaces. In this paper, we investigate whether constrained Hilbert spaces permit local thermalization. Specifically, we explore whether the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) holds in a pinned Fibonacci anyon chain, which serves as a representative case study. We first establish that the constrained Hilbert space admits a notion of locality by showing that the influence of a measurement decays exponentially in space. This suggests that the constraints are no impediment to thermalization. We then provide numerical evidence that ETH holds for the diagonal and off-diagonal matrix elements of various local observables in a generic disorder-free nonintegrable model. We also find that certain nonlocal observables obey ETH.