Exact Thermal Stabilizer Eigenstates at Infinite Temperature

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Hokkyo, Akihiro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Hokkyo, Akihiro
author_facet Hokkyo, Akihiro
contents Understanding how microscopic few-body interactions give rise to thermal behavior in isolated quantum many-body systems remains a central challenge in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. While individual energy eigenstates are expected to reproduce thermal equilibrium values, analytic access to highly entangled thermal eigenstates of nonintegrable Hamiltonians remains scarce. In this Letter, we construct exact infinite-temperature eigenstates of generically nonintegrable two-body Hamiltonians using stabilizer states. These states can fully reproduce thermal expectation values for all spatially local observables, extending previously known Bell-pair-based constructions to a broader class. At the same time, we prove a sharp no-go theorem: stabilizer eigenstates of two-body Hamiltonians cannot satisfy microscopic thermal equilibrium for all four-body observables. This bound is tight, as we explicitly construct a translationally invariant Hamiltonian whose stabilizer eigenstate is thermal for all two-body and three-body observables as well as all spatially local observables. Our results suggest that reproducing higher-order thermal correlations requires nonstabilizer degrees of freedom, providing analytic insight into the interplay between interaction locality, microscopic thermal equilibrium, and quantum computational complexity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_16177
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exact Thermal Stabilizer Eigenstates at Infinite Temperature
Hokkyo, Akihiro
Quantum Physics
Statistical Mechanics
Understanding how microscopic few-body interactions give rise to thermal behavior in isolated quantum many-body systems remains a central challenge in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. While individual energy eigenstates are expected to reproduce thermal equilibrium values, analytic access to highly entangled thermal eigenstates of nonintegrable Hamiltonians remains scarce. In this Letter, we construct exact infinite-temperature eigenstates of generically nonintegrable two-body Hamiltonians using stabilizer states. These states can fully reproduce thermal expectation values for all spatially local observables, extending previously known Bell-pair-based constructions to a broader class. At the same time, we prove a sharp no-go theorem: stabilizer eigenstates of two-body Hamiltonians cannot satisfy microscopic thermal equilibrium for all four-body observables. This bound is tight, as we explicitly construct a translationally invariant Hamiltonian whose stabilizer eigenstate is thermal for all two-body and three-body observables as well as all spatially local observables. Our results suggest that reproducing higher-order thermal correlations requires nonstabilizer degrees of freedom, providing analytic insight into the interplay between interaction locality, microscopic thermal equilibrium, and quantum computational complexity.
title Exact Thermal Stabilizer Eigenstates at Infinite Temperature
topic Quantum Physics
Statistical Mechanics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16177