Title: Chaos and thermalization in small quantum systems,
Abstract: Chaos and ergodicity are the cornerstones of statistical physics and
thermodynamics. While classically even small systems like a particle in a
two-dimensional cavity, can exhibit chaotic behavior and thereby relax to a
microcanonical ensemble, quantum systems formally can not. Recent theoretical
breakthroughs and, in particular, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis
(ETH) however indicate that quantum systems can also thermalize. In fact ETH
provided us with a framework connecting microscopic models and macroscopic
phenomena, based on the notion of highly entangled quantum states. Such
thermalization was beautifully demonstrated experimentally by A. Kaufman et.
al. who studied relaxation dynamics of a small lattice system of interacting
bosonic particles. By directly measuring the entanglement entropy of
subsystems, as well as other observables, they showed that after the initial
transient time the system locally relaxes to a thermal ensemble while globally
maintaining a zero-entropy pure state.