Symmetry-resolved properties of the trace distance in thermalizing SU(2) systems

We study diagnostics of thermalization in quantum many-body systems with global SU(2) symmetry, where the standard eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) is generalized to its non-Abelian form. As an eigenstate-level probe, we introduce a symmetry-resolved trace distance constructed from the block structure of the reduced density matrix. This block structure separates spin-sector probabilities from configurational fluctuations within each sector, naturally leading to a decomposition into a probability trace distance and a configurational trace distance. The microcanonical average of the former is bounded by fluctuations of the corresponding spin-sector probabilities within a microcanonical energy window, whereas the latter captures finer intra-sector fluctuations. In non-Abelian thermalizing systems, these spin-sector-probability fluctuations are constrained by the non-Abelian ETH and therefore become exponentially suppressed with system size. Numerical studies of the one-dimensional (J_1)--(J_2) Heisenberg chain are consistent with this picture and suggest that, in the thermal regime, the trace distance is asymptotically dominated by the configurational trace distance.

Source: arXiv:2603.26540v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26540v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.26540v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26540v1