Chaos and High Temperature Pure State Thermalization

Abstract

Classical arguments for thermalization of isolated systems do not apply in a straightforward way to the quantum case. Recently, there has been interest in diagnostics of quantum chaos in many- body systems. In the classical case, chaos is a popular explanation for the legitimacy of the methods of statistical physics. In this work, we relate a previously proposed criteria of quantum chaos in the unitary time evolution operator to the entanglement entropy growth for a far-from-equilibrium initial pure state. By mapping the unitary time evolution operator to a doubled state, chaos can be characterized by suppression of mutual information between subsystems of the past and that of the future. We show that when this mutual information is small, a typical unentangled initial state will evolve to a highly entangled final state. Our result provides a more concrete connection between quantum chaos and thermalization in many-body systems.