Bruno Bertini (Author), Katja Klobas (Author), Pavel Kos (Author), Daniel Malz (Author)

Abstract

Understanding thermalization in quantum many-body systems is among the most enduring problems in modern physics. A particularly interesting question concerns the role played by quantum mechanics in this process, i.e., whether thermalization in quantum many-body systems is fundamentally different from that in classical many-body systems and, if so, which of its features are genuinely quantum. Here, we study this question in minimally structured many-body systems that are only constrained to have local interactions, i.e., local random circuits. In particular, we introduce random permutation circuits (RPCs), which are circuits comprising gates that locally permute basis states, as a counterpart to random unitary circuits (RUCs), a standard toy model for generic quantum dynamics. RPCs represent a model for generic microscopic classical reversible dynamics but, interestingly, can be interpreted both as classical or as quantum dynamics. We show that, upon averaging over all circuit realizations, RPCs permit the analytical computation of several key quantities such as out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) and entanglement entropies. In the classical setting, we obtain similar exact results relating (quantum) purity to (classical) growth of mutual information and (quantum) OTOCs to (classical) decorrelators. We, thus, discover a series of exact relations, connecting quantities in RUC and (quantum or classical) RPCs. Our results indicate that, despite the fundamental differences between quantum and classical systems, their many-body dynamics exhibits remarkably similar behaviors.

Keywords

kvantna fizika;statistična fizika;quantum physics;statistical physics;

Data

Language: English
Year of publishing:
Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
Organization: UL FMF - Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
UDC: 536.93
COBISS: 224449795 Link will open in a new window
ISSN: 2160-3308
Views: 31
Downloads: 0
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Other data

Secondary language: Slovenian
Secondary keywords: kvantna fizika;statistična fizika;
Type (COBISS): Article
Pages: str. 011015-1-011015-27
Volume: ǂVol. ǂ15
Issue: ǂiss. ǂ1
Chronology: 2025
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.15.011015
ID: 25801738