Unitarity, ergodicity, and quantum thermodynamics

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the ergodic subspaces of the state spaces of isolated quantum systems. We prove a new ergodic theorem for closed quantum systems which shows that the equilibrium state of the system takes the form of a grand canonical density matrix involving a complete commuting set of observables including the Hamiltonian. The result obtained, which is derived for a generic finite-dimensional quantum system, shows that the equilibrium state arising from unitary evolution is always expressible in the canonical form, without the consideration of a system-bath decomposition.