Quantum statistical mechanics in a closed system

Abstract

A closed quantum-mechanical system with a large number of degrees of freedom does not necessarily give time averages in agreement with the microcanonical distribution. For systems where the different degrees of freedom are uncoupled, situations are discussed that show a violation of the usual statistical-mechanical rules. By adding a finite but very small perturbation in the form of a random matrix, it is shown that the results of quantum statistical mechanics are recovered. Expectation values in energy eigenstates for this perturbed system are also discussed, and deviations from the microcanonical result are shown to become exponentially small in the number of degrees of freedom.