Periodic thermodynamics of isolated systems
Abstract
The nature of the behaviour of an isolated many-body quantum system periodically driven in time has been an open question since the beginning of quantum mechanics. After an initial transient, such a system is known to synchronize with the driving; in contrast to the non-driven case, no fundamental principle has been proposed for constructing the resulting non-equilibrium state. Here, we analytically show that, for a class of integrable systems, the relevant ensemble is constructed by maximizing an appropriately defined entropy subject to constraints, which we explicitly identify. This result constitutes a generalisation of the concepts of equilibrium statistical mechanics to a class of far-from-equilibrium-systems, up to now mainly accessible using ad-hoc methods.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1401.0164,
title = {Periodic thermodynamics of isolated systems},
author = {Achilleas Lazarides and Arnab Das and Roderich Moessner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.0164},
year = {2014}
}