Does a single eigenstate encode the full Hamiltonian?

TL;DR

This paper explores whether a single eigenstate contains complete information about the Hamiltonian, demonstrating that reduced density matrices of eigenstates can reflect thermal properties and encode Hamiltonian details.

Contribution

The authors formulate a strong ETH version showing eigenstates encode Hamiltonian information, supported by numerical studies on non-integrable and particle-number conserving models.

Findings

Eigenstates' reduced density matrices become thermal in the thermodynamic limit.

Subsystem entanglement entropy matches thermal entropy for less than half the system.

Single eigenstates can reveal Hamiltonian properties at arbitrary energies.

Abstract

The Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) posits that the reduced density matrix for a subsystem corresponding to an excited eigenstate is "thermal." Here we expound on this hypothesis by asking: for which class of operators, local or non-local, is ETH satisfied? We show that this question is directly related to a seemingly unrelated question: is the Hamiltonian of a system encoded within a single eigenstate? We formulate a strong form of ETH where in the thermodynamic limit, the reduced density matrix of a subsystem corresponding to a pure, finite energy density eigenstate asymptotically becomes equal to the thermal reduced density matrix, as long as the subsystem size is much less than the total system size, irrespective of how large the subsystem is compared to any intrinsic length scale of the system. This allows one to access the properties of the underlying Hamiltonian at arbitrary energy densities/temperatures using just a $\textit{single}$ eigenstate. We provide support for our conjecture by performing an exact diagonalization study of a non-integrable 1D lattice quantum model with only energy conservation. In addition, we examine the case in which the subsystem size is a finite fraction of the total system size, and find that even in this case, a large class of operators continue to match their canonical expectation values. Specifically, the von Neumann entanglement entropy equals the thermal entropy as long as the subsystem is less than half the total system. We also study, both analytically and numerically, a particle number conserving model at infinite temperature which substantiates our conjectures.