Weak eigenstate thermalization with large deviation bound (1609.09776v1)

Abstract: We investigate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) for a translationally invariant quantum spin system on the $d$-dimensional cubic lattice under the periodic boundary conditions. It is known that the ETH holds in this model for typical energy eigenstates in the sense that the standard deviation of the expectation values of a local observable in the energy eigenstates within the microcanonical energy shell vanishes in the thermodynamic limit, which is called the weak ETH. Here, it is remarked that the diagonal elements of a local observable in the energy representation shows the large deviation behavior. This result implies that the fraction of atypical eigenstates which do not represent thermal equilibrium is exponentially small.