Matthew Fisher (UCSB) - Can Thermalization Breakdown in Quantum Many-body Systems?

Event time: 
Thursday, May 21, 2015 - 12:45pm
Location: 
Becton Seminar Room MC035 See map
15 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT
Event description: 

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.