The foundations of statistical mechanics from entanglement: Individual states vs. averages

By Sandu Popescu, Anthony J. Short, Andreas J. Winter. 2005

282 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider an alternative approach to the foundations of statistical mechanics, in which subjective randomness, ensemble-averaging or time-averaging are not required. Instead, the universe (i.e. the system together with a suﬃciently large environment) is in a quantum pure state subject to a global constraint, and thermalisation results from entanglement between system and environment. We formulate and prove a “General Canonical Principle”, which states that the system will be thermalised for almost all pure states of the universe, and provide rigorous quantitative bounds using Levy’s Lemma.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4191e175b30730fc05dcf07c40e813b7cd5f4ea

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Connecting ansatz expressibility to gradient magnitudes and barren plateaus (2021, background): “[68] S Popescu, AJ Short, and A Winter, “The foundations of statistical mechanics from entanglement: Individual states vs.”
Thermodynamics (2021, unknown): “[44] and [45]).”
Entanglement Induced Barren Plateaus (2020, methodology): “The result then follows immediately from invoking Theorem 2 from the result of Popescu et al [20] that Next let us assume that ρ = e − H / Tr( e − H ) .”
Scrambling Dynamics and Out-of-Time-Ordered Correlators in Quantum Many-Body Systems (2022, background): “The averaged Rényi entropy captures well the Rényi entropy of a particular U for large systems because the system size strongly suppresses the variance due to quantum typicality [22].”