Analytic model of thermalization: Quantum emulation of classical cellular automata

We introduce a method of quantum emulation of a classical reversible cellular automaton. By applying this method to a chaotic cellular automaton, the obtained quantum many-body system thermalizes while all the energy eigenstates and eigenvalues are solvable. These explicit solutions allow us to verify the validity of some scenarios of thermalization to this system. We find that two leading scenarios, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis scenario and the large effective dimension scenario, do not explain thermalization in this model.