Abstract
We demonstrate that the entanglement entropy area law for free fermion ground states and the corresponding volume law for highly excited states are related by a position-momentum duality, and thus are of the same origin. For a typical excited state in the thermodynamic limit, we further show that the reduced density matrix of a subsystem approaches the thermal density matrix, provided the subsystem's linear size is small compared to that of the whole system in all directions, a property we dub eigenstate typicality. This provides an explicit example of thermalization via entanglement, and reveals how statistical physics emerges from a single eigenstate by tracing out a large number of degrees of freedom.
- Received 17 September 2014
- Revised 23 October 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.91.081110
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