Abstract
We show that a bounded, isolated quantum system of many particles in a specific initial state will approach thermal equilibrium if the energy eigenfunctions which are superposed to form that state obey Berry’s conjecture. Berry’s conjecture is expected to hold only if the corresponding classical system is chaotic, and essentially states that the energy eigenfunctions behave as if they were Gaussian random variables. We review the existing evidence, and show that previously neglected effects substantially strengthen the case for Berry’s conjecture. We study a rarefied hard-sphere gas as an explicit example of a many-body system which is known to be classically chaotic, and show that an energy eigenstate which obeys Berry’s conjecture predicts a Maxwell-Boltzmann, Bose-Einstein, or Fermi-Dirac distribution for the momentum of each constituent particle, depending on whether the wave functions are taken to be nonsymmetric, completely symmetric, or completely antisymmetric functions of the positions of the particles. We call this phenomenon eigenstate thermalization. We show that a generic initial state will approach thermal equilibrium at least as fast as O(ħ/Δ), where Δ is the uncertainty in the total energy of the gas. This result holds for an individual initial state; in contrast to the classical theory, no averaging over an ensemble of initial states is needed. We argue that these results constitute a sound foundation for quantum statistical mechanics.
- Received 21 March 1994
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.50.888
©1994 American Physical Society
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PRE Milestones
Physical Review E published its 50,000th paper in September 2015. To celebrate this, the journal presents a series of milestone papers that were published since its inception in 1993. This is an eclectic collection of papers that made significant contributions to their field, chosen by the editors. A new milestone will be added each week.