Fading ergodicity

Kliczkowski, Maksymilian (author), Świętek, Rafał (author), Hopjan, Miroslav (author), Vidmar, Lev (author)

Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) represents a breakthrough in many-body physics since it allows us to link thermalization of physical observables with the applicability of random matrix theory (RMT). Recent years were also extremely fruitful in exploring possible counterexamples to thermalization, ranging, among others, from integrability, single-particle chaos, many-body localization, many-body scars, to Hilbert-space fragmentation. In all these cases the conventional ETH is violated. However, it remains elusive how the conventional ETH breaks down when one approaches the boundaries of ergodicity, and whether the range of validity of the conventional ETH coincides with the validity of RMT-like spectral statistics. Here we bridge this gap and we introduce a scenario of the ETH breakdown in many-body quantum systems, dubbed fading ergodicity regime, which establishes a link between the conventional ETH and nonergodic behavior. We conjecture this scenario to be relevant for the description of finite many-body systems at the boundaries of ergodicity, and we provide numerical and analytical arguments for its validity in the quantum sun model of ergodicity-breaking phase transition. For the latter, we provide evidence that the breakdown of the conventional ETH is not associated with the breakdown of the RMT-like spectral statistics.

• Language: English
• Keywords: ergodicity, eigenstate thermalization, many-body localization, random matrix theory
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FMF - Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2024
• Number of pages: Str. 134206-1-134206-12
• Numbering: Vol. 110, iss. 13
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-165400
• UDC: 536.9
• ISSN on article: 2469-9950
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.110.134206
• COBISS.SI-ID: 217704195
• Publication date in RUL: 05.12.2024

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Physical review
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• ISSN: 2469-9950
• COBISS.SI-ID: 2997348

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: ergodičnost, termalizacija lastnih stanj, lokalizacija, teorija naključnih matrik