Dynamical thermalization in Bose-Hubbard systems

Abstract: We numerically study a Bose-Hubbard ring of finite size with disorder containing a finite number of bosons that are subject to an on-site two-body interaction. Our results show that moderate interactions induce dynamical thermalization in this isolated system. In this regime the individual many-body eigenstates are well described by the standard thermal Bose-Einstein distribution for well-defined values of the temperature and the chemical potential which depend on the eigenstate under consideration. We show that the dynamical thermalization conjecture works well both at positive and negative temperatures. The relations to quantum chaos, quantum ergodicity and to the Aberg criterion are also discussed.