Typicality of Pure States Randomly Sampled According to the Gaussian Adjusted Projected Measure

Consider a mixed quantum mechanical state, describing a statistical ensemble in terms of an arbitrary density operator ρ of low purity, tr ρ ² ≪1, and yielding the ensemble averaged expectation value tr (ρ A) for any observable A. Assuming that the given statistical ensemble ρ is generated by randomly sampling pure states |ψ〉 according to the corresponding so-called Gaussian adjusted projected measure (Goldstein et al. in J. Stat. Phys. 125:1197, 2006), the expectation value 〈ψ|A|ψ〉 is shown to be extremely close to the ensemble average tr (ρ A) for the overwhelming majority of pure states |ψ〉 and any experimentally realistic observable A. In particular, such a ‘typicality’ property holds  whenever the Hilbert space ℋ of the system contains a high dimensional subspace ℋ₊⊂ℋ with the property that all |ψ〉∈ℋ₊ are realized with equal probability and all other |ψ〉∈ℋ are excluded.