Properties of Thermal Quantum States: Locality of Temperature, Decay of Correlations, and More

Abstract

We review several properties of thermal states of spin Hamiltonians with short range interactions. In particular, we focus on those aspects in which the application of tools coming from quantum information theory has been specially successful in the recent years. This comprises the study of the correlations at finite and zero temperature, the stability against distant and/or weak perturbations, the locality of temperature and their classical simulatability. For the case of states with a finite correlation length, we review the results on their energy distribution and the equivalence of the canonical and microcanonical ensemble.