The Condensed Matter Seminar Series & The Yale Quantum Institute present Prof. Matthew Fisher’s Seminar:
“Can Thermalization Breakdown in Quantum Many-body Systems?”
We describe a new diagnostic for thermal (volume law entangled) many-body wavefunctions, involving making a partial (projective) measurement on a subset of the degrees of freedom and analyzing the spatial entanglement properties of the unmeasured degrees of freedom. In a Quantum Disentangled state, the post-measurement entanglement entropy is an area law, revealing a hidden locality. Eigenstates of such form would indicate a subtle breakdown of thermalization due to quantum effects. Numerics searching for such Quantum Disentangled eigenstates in 1d Hubbard-type models will be discussed in detail.