Localized thermal states

It is believed that thermalization in closed systems of interacting particles can occur only when the eigenstates are fully delocalized and chaotic in the preferential (unperturbed) basis of the total Hamiltonian. Here we demonstrate that at variance with this common belief the typical situation in the systems with two-body inter-particle interaction is much more complicated and allows to treat as thermal even eigenstates that are not fully delocalized. Using a semi-analytical approach we establish the conditions for the emergence of such thermal states in a model of randomly interacting bosons. Our numerical data show an excellent correspondence with the predicted properties of localized thermal eigenstates.