How accurately can the microcanonical ensemble describe small isolated quantum systems?

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys

Department of Physics, University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.

Published: August 2015

We numerically investigate quantum quenches of a nonintegrable hard-core Bose-Hubbard model to test the accuracy of the microcanonical ensemble in small isolated quantum systems. We show that, in a certain range of system size, the accuracy increases with the dimension of the Hilbert space D as 1/D. We ascribe this rapid improvement to the absence of correlations between many-body energy eigenstates. Outside of that range, the accuracy is found to scale either as 1/√D or algebraically with the system size.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.92.020102DOI Listing

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