English

Thermalization and irreversibility of an isolated quantum system

Quantum Physics 2025-11-24 v3

Abstract

The irreversibility and thermalization of many-body systems can be attributed to the erasure of spread non-equilibrium state information by local operations. This thermalization mechanism can be demonstrated by the sequence of O^i(ti)\hat{O}_i(t_i), where Oi^\hat{O_i} is a local operator, Oi^(ti)=eiH^tiOi^eiH^ti\hat{O_i}(t_i) = e^{i\hat{H}t_i} \hat{O_i} e^{-i\hat{H}t_i}, H^\hat{H} is the system Hamiltonian, tit_i can take positive, negative, or zero values, and the sequence is arranged according to the subscript ii. We numerically demonstrate the information erasure of initial non-equilibrium quantum states through such sequence in a one-dimensional Hubbard model. During this process, the system's entanglement entropy increases monotonically toward a stable value. By incorporating this information erasure mechanism into an isolated system, our numerical simulations reveal that in this completely isolated system, a thermalization process emerges.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.04152,
  title  = {Thermalization and irreversibility of an isolated quantum system},
  author = {Xue-Yi Guo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.04152},
  year   = {2025}
}