English

Thermalization and irreversibility of an isolated quantum system II

Quantum Physics 2025-11-24 v5

Abstract

The irreversible entropy increase described by the second law of thermodynamics is fundamentally tied to thermalization and the emergence of equilibrium. In the first part of our work (Ref: arXiv.2503.04152), we constructed an isolated gas system model and numerically demonstrated irreversible growth of entanglement entropy caused by erasure of spread non-equilibrium state information. Here, we mathematically prove that for a typical macroscopic system in a non-equilibrium state ϕ0|\phi_0\rangle, the quantum state ϕ0=O^(t)ϕ0|\phi'_0\rangle = \hat{O}(t)|\phi_0\rangle will inevitably evolve toward equilibrium. Our work demonstrates that the second law of thermodynamics, and consequently the ergodic hypothesis in statistical physics, can be understood and proven from a quantum information perspective. From this perspective, the second law can be stated as: In typical macroscopic physical systems, the spreading and erasure of non-equilibrium information is inevitable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.01351,
  title  = {Thermalization and irreversibility of an isolated quantum system II},
  author = {Xue-Yi Guo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.01351},
  year   = {2025}
}