Fading ergodicity

TL;DR

This paper introduces the fading ergodicity regime, a scenario describing how the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) breaks down at the boundaries of ergodicity in many-body quantum systems, linking non-ergodic behavior with spectral statistics.

Contribution

It proposes the fading ergodicity regime as a new framework for understanding ETH breakdown near ergodic boundaries, supported by analytical and numerical analysis in the quantum sun model.

Findings

ETH breakdown occurs without spectral statistics losing RMT-like behavior.

Fading ergodicity links ETH failure to non-ergodic phases in many-body systems.

Numerical evidence supports the scenario in the quantum sun model.

Abstract

Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) represents a breakthrough in many-body physics since it allows to link thermalization of physical observables with the applicability of random matrix theory (RMT). Recent years were also extremely fruitful in exploring possible counterexamples to thermalization, ranging, among others, from integrability, single-particle chaos, many-body localization, many-body scars, to Hilbert-space fragmentation. In all these cases the conventional ETH is violated. However, it remains elusive how the conventional ETH breaks down when one approaches the boundaries of ergodicity, and whether the range of validity of the conventional ETH coincides with the validity of RMT-like spectral statistics. Here we bridge this gap and we introduce a scenario of the ETH breakdown in many-body quantum systems, dubbed fading ergodicity regime, which establishes a link between the conventional ETH and non-ergodic behavior. We conjecture this scenario to be relevant for the description of finite many-body systems at the boundaries of ergodicity, and we provide numerical and analytical arguments for its validity in the quantum sun model of ergodicity breaking phase transition. For the latter, we provide evidence that the breakdown of the conventional ETH is not associated with the breakdown of the RMT-like spectral statistics.