Local emergence of thermal correlations in an isolated quantum many-body system
Quantum Gases
2013-10-16 v1 Statistical Mechanics
Quantum Physics
Abstract
We experimentally demonstrate how thermal properties in an non-equilibrium quantum many- body system emerge locally, spread in space and time, and finally lead to the globally relaxed state. In our experiment, we quench a one-dimensional (1D) Bose gas by coherently splitting it into two parts. By monitoring the phase coherence between the two parts we observe that the thermal correlations of a prethermalized state emerge locally in their final form and propagate through the system in a light-cone-like evolution. Our results underline the close link between the propagation of correlations and relaxation processes in quantum many-body systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1305.3708,
title = {Local emergence of thermal correlations in an isolated quantum many-body system},
author = {Tim Langen and Remi Geiger and Maximilian Kuhnert and Bernhard Rauer and Joerg Schmiedmayer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.3708},
year = {2013}
}