Temperature of a single chaotic eigenstate.

Borgonovi, Fausto; Mattiotti, Francesco; Izrailev, Felix M · Phys Rev E · 2017

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

The onset of thermalization in a closed system of randomly interacting bosons at the level of a single eigenstate is discussed. We focus on the emergence of Bose-Einstein distribution of single-particle occupation numbers, and we give a local criterion for thermalization dependent on the eigenstate energy. We show how to define the temperature of an eigenstate, provided that it has a chaotic structure in the basis defined by the single-particle states. The analytical expression for the eigenstate temperature as a function of both interparticle interaction and energy is complemented by numerical data.